The National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC) will train farmers in primary cooperatives in rural areas of India through its newly launched programme, Sahakar Pragya.
Union agriculture minister, Narendra Singh Tomar formally launched the programme in New Delhi on Tuesday.
“Sahakar Pragya embodies enhancing NCDC’s training capacity through an elaborate network of 18 regional training centres across the country by the Laxmanrao Inamdar National Academy for Cooperative Research and Development (LINAC),”
The academy is fully funded by NCDC.
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Sahakar Pragya comprises of the launch of 45 training modules for transferring knowledge, skills and organizational capacities to equip the cooperative societies to run their affairs in terms of the market economy, said an NCDC official.
The minister also directed the corporation to empower farmers in primary cooperatives through innovative training programmes.
The corporation has been proactive in delivering innovative solutions for the cooperative sector and has advanced loans to the tunes of Rs 1.58 lakh crores to cooperative societies of various categories across the country.
It has also helped in creating a market-linked cooperative business plan ecosystem in agriculture and allied activities.
The country has a huge network of over 8.50 lakh cooperative societies with about 290 million members.
Ninety-four per cent of the farmers in the country are members of at least one cooperative society at present.