Cooperative organization and management

By their sheer size, coverage, funds involved and the facets of national life that these touch, the cooperatives present a formidable picture. What with working capital exceeding Rs. 10,000 crores, diversification that ranges from the supply of agricultural inputs to processing of sugar cane, oil seeds and milk; from production of fertiliser to handloom cloth and coir matting, from film making to rickshaw pulling; coverage that extends all over the country including the remotest parts; membership that exceeds the 5 crore mark, the position could hardly be different. The cooperatives have indeed emerged as a significant sector on the nation's economic scene, especially in the rural areas.

Impressive as this emergence of the cooperatives in the country is, it has not always been matched by the quality of their performance. Leadership steeped in the traditional styles and concepts of management, has often displayed a singular lack of appreciation of the imperatives of a modern growth oriented enterprise. It still tends to value the classical co operative traditions of democratic control and management, without realising that the very size, technology and capital employed in most of the large sized cooperatives also make them business enterprises competing on equal terms in a competitive setting for talent, capital and markets. This demands the application of the concepts of management which only professionals-trained, cultivated and groomed in a culture characterised by objectivity, rationality and 'will to show' results alone can marshal and apply. Let it be stated that mere adherence to ideologies or a set of principles, however laudatory these may be, can hardly alleviate the quality of management of an organisation, if those entrusted with its day-to-day opera tions fail to grasp the significance of modern management principles, practices and techniques.