Role of CSR in Social Development: A Case of Milk Cooperatives

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1 Role of CSR in Social Development: A Case of Milk Cooperatives Prabakaran.M Ph.D. Scholar, Department of Political Science Periyar Maniammai University, Tamil Nadu Abstract: Government of India taken up a project called White Revolution / Operation Flood through cooperatives by implementing Anand Pattern throughout India for improving the social development, living standards of the rural people and rural economy. Milk cooperative is corporate and public sector organization and it is registered under Cooperative Act and Rules by Cooperative Registrar. The main aim of this article is to analyze the phenomenal growth of social development through encouraging farmers to keep more milch animals, movement of procurement and input systems, enrolment, registering and managing women milk cooperative societies. The main objective of the study is to analyze the social development and improvement of socio economy status of the farmers. Key Words: Operation Flood, Social Development, Social Justice, Socio Economic INTRODUCTION In India, cooperation has been visualized and adopted as most potential instrument for development, particularly after the advent of planning in the country. The significance of cooperation in India was best described by late Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India as in the economic structure of India Cooperation is not even a free choice, it is a necessity. After 1947, with the initiation of Five year plan programmes, dairying has progressively been receiving more and more emphasis and getting greater allocation of funds. There is a growing realization that promotion of dairying not only contributed towards national health building but also creates substantial employment opportunities. Properly organized and developed, dairying could be effectively used as an instrument of social justice. Dairy sector has assumed much significance by generating income not only to the rural but also to the urban and semi-urban population in the state especially to women folk by providing self employment opportunity. Milk and milk products provide essential nutrition to all walks of life. It provides livelihood to millions of small and marginal farmers in the State. India is an agricultural oriented country and majority of the farmers owns cattle. Dairying provides the main source of income next to agriculture. In a tropical country like India, agriculture may fail sometimes, due to monsoon failure but dairying never fails and gives them regular, steady income. Milk production in India is characterized by the fact that almost every farmer and a large proportion of landless agricultural workers are milk producers. Nearly two-thirds of milk producers are small and marginal farmers and landless agricultural workers. Operation Flood had produced many indirect benefits to the rural population. Dairying helped the economic emancipation of women in many villages. IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 68

2 Operation Flood: The world s largest dairy development programme ever undertaken, the Operation Flood (OF) undertook the task of upgrading and modernization milk production, procurement, processing and marketing with assistance provided by the World Food Programme, the European Economic Community (EEC), the World Bank and other international agencies. Designed and implemented by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and the Indian Dairy Corporation (IDC), the project was launched in July Its basic concept comprises the establishment of cooperative structure on the Anand Pattern and its aims are to increase milk production in the villages and to improve the living standards of the rural poor and rural economy by increasing supplementary income, fair prices to producers and consumers and employment opportunities in the rural areas and reduce malpractices by milk traders and merchants introduced by Dr.Varghese Kurian who is popularly known as the milk man in India and father of White Revolution. He said that it is the elimination of the intermediaries that is responsible for the success of the Anand pattern of dairy cooperatives. KEY AREAS OF DEVELOPMENT Development refers to increasing the spiritual, political, social or economic strength of individuals and communities. It often involves the empowered developing confidence in their capacities. Development is a multidimensional construct. As suggested by the World Bank for assessing the Operation Flood programme on three dimension; social development, economic development, and political development. Farmer Development Cooperatives create a new life in villages and play a major role in providing credit, supplies and market facilities to the agriculturists. The agricultural worker should receive special consideration in respect of the minimum wage and employment in secondary occupation. The goal of white revolution should be cooperative rural economy based on the village community and on voluntary association. Millions of small and marginal farmers developed through village dairy cooperatives. AMUL pattern societies across the country made farmers rich in tangible and intangible wealth. Women Development Milch cattle in India are mainly tended by women. Amul realized this and built women development activities as an important component of its dairy development programme. In the early phases of Operation Flood, the strategy was to train women in modern animal husbandry practices, and a large number of training programmes were specifically organized for them. Special incentives were given to all women dairy cooperative societies in order to encourage participation of women in governance of the cooperatives. Exclusive milk societies for women producers have been formed in India, where women have emerged as leaders and formed social groups to promote the welfare of women, especially those belonging to the economically weaker section. All these developments clearly demonstrated that dairying can establish itself as a very effective instrument of women s socio-economic change in the rural areas. IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 69

3 In its 1976 report on rural employment, the National Commission on Agriculture observed that next to crops, animal husbandry programmes have the largest employment potential. The most important features of these programmes are that they provide subsidiary occupation, offer gainful employment at the location itself, and make better utilization of female and child labour. Most of these programmes are particularly suitable for weaker sections of the rural community and have redistributive effect on rural income in favour of them. As far as development of women is concerned, this took place mainly through the women dairy cooperative societies (WDS). In the WDCs women find themselves development, as they are authorized to make their own decisions in meetings held outside the home. Income from WDCs enables the women to make most household expenditures without being dependent on their husbands. Operation Flood has also played an important role in generating employment for women. With 3.5 million milk supplies, it is reasonable to assume that 5 per cent represented women who were able to stay at home rather than go out for work. This withdrawal of women from the labour force will have created an additional 1,75,000 labouring jobs, pre-dominantly for the very poor, reveals the assessment report of the World Bank in Social Development The First Prime Minister of India, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru commended to the people the ideal of cooperation as a means to establish a socialist society. He said that cooperatives were the very foundation of tomorrow s progressive society. The world needs a society where cooperation and not exploitation is the order of the day. He said that cooperation was useful not only from the economic but also from the social point of view. While it helped people fight poverty it also instilled in them a spirit of unit and team work. In fact, I have no doubt that a day will come when the entire world will be a large cooperative society. Only the cooperative movement, could lay the foundation for an egalitarian society, where everybody would get an equal opportunity, said Dr. D.R. Gadgil, Former Vice-Chairman designate of the Planning Commission. Renowned Sociologist B.S.Bavisar explains that Operation Flood was considered a means of overcoming the barriers of caste, class, and power, something earlier rural development programs had been unable to do. The Former Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi said the Government s interest in the cooperative movement was deep because the country had still a long way to go in strengthening its unity and freedom and in providing means for a new life to the people. In its 1976 report on rural employment, the National Commission on Agriculture observed that next to crops, animal husbandry programmes have the largest employment potential. The most important features of these programmes are that they provide subsidiary occupation, after gainful employment at the location itself, and make better utilization of female and child labour. Most of these programmes, are particularly suitable for weaker sections of the rural community and have redistributive effect on rural income in favour of them. Since milk production does not require much land, but family labour which the poor have amply, the landless poor can easily and profitably participate in the white revolution, deriving employment and additional income from it. Since milk is not a polluting substance in the Hindu religious ideology, people belonging to any case, even the lowest, can and do participate in producing IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 70

4 milk. Also cooperative which organize only milk producers can successfully bypass the constraint of village power structure. It is true that millions of landless, marginal, and small farmers who were engaged in milk production benefited greatly from the increased income and employment opportunities generated by Operation Flood. Of the farm families covered under Operation Flood, 21 per cent had no land and another 66 per cent were marginal and small farmers owning less than two hectares of land. Over 70 per cent of the participating households had just one or two milch animals. Thus, Operation Flood turned out in practice to be a pro-poor programme that made the distribution of incremental income from milk among rural milk-producing households more equitable. As Schools of Democracy, cooperative enterprises also contribute to the promotion of social stability. It is clear that governments, although they may create an enabling environment, cannot achieve or maintain sustainable development without an interactive social partnership, actively involving all of civil society in an empowered, democratic manner. Thus, with its globe-spanning dimensions and diversity and its insistence on social partnership, participatory democracy, empowerment, and people-centred sustainable development, the cooperative movement reflects a strong, deep current of humanism that forms the bedrock of social development. Economic Development The economic development aspects, Operation Flood (OF) deals connect the people and their institutions with market. In the pre-of era, milk pricing was not used as an instrument of dairy development. No effort was made by any government to ensure a remunerative price to the producer, but the consumer price of milk supplied through government-run city milk schemes was invariably subsidized. This had two adverse effects on dairy development. First, in the absence of a year-round remunerative price for milk, the producer did not have any incentive to increase milk production through better breeding, feeding, and management of animals. Therefore, milk production increased at a miserably low rate of one per cent per year in the pre-of era. Second, by selling milk for less than its cost and less than the open market price, city milk schemes incurred huge losses year after year, and as a result were not able to save and plough back any money into modernizing and expanding their activities. Thus, the milk pricing policy followed before 1970 was both anti-producer and anti-dairy development. For the first time, OF accorded the highest priority to ensuring a year-round and dependable market at remunerative prices for rurally produced milk. Indeed, OF was originally conceived as a marketing project. The producer price of milk in most OF areas is determined by the state government concerned and is set at a level that is considered remunerative to the milk producers. Although the cost of milk production is not explicitly considered in setting the producer price, there is evidence to show that the terms of trade over the last decade or so have been favourable to the milk producers. The time- series data on the producer price of milk and the wholesale price of oilcakes, which account for nearly three-fourths of the total cost of milk production, confirm this. Over the period 1987 to 1996, the compound annual rate of growth in the producer price of milk was 10.9 per cent as compared to 5.8 per cent in the wholesale price of oilcakes. The strategy evolved by early dairy cooperatives in Gujarat proved decidedly superior to alternative ones being tested in the 1960s, such as key village scheme or the system under which government-owned milk plants collected and processed milk produced by contractors. The Anand Pattern emphasized keeping cattle in the hinterland and transporting milk to cities by farmer cooperatives, rather than transporting cattle as well as fodder to cities. Thus the system had strong IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 71

5 comparative advantage. As a result, the early dairy unions in Gujarat such as Kaira, Mehsana, Sabarantha, Banasantha, and others rapidly emerged as large and successful farmer organizations, with hundreds of thousands of members dominating the economies of their domains. Operation Flood was not conceived as an all-purpose poverty eradicating program. It cannot be, because it focuses on a single productive activity, dairying, while the ranks of the rural poor include many different categories of the disenfranchised; the old, the infirm, tribals, the landless, small farmers, artisans, and so forth. Nonetheless, it is notable that the increased income from milk under OF encouraged by process of change in other activities of the milk producing households and contributed to their overall socio-economic development. Political Development The political development aspect of the white revolution deals with connecting poor people with the government. The OF Programme was able to connect the grassroots-level dairy cooperatives not only with the state and central governments, but also with international agencies. On the first International Day of Cooperatives on 1 July 1995, United National Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali observed: Cooperative enterprises provide the organizational means whereby a significant proportion of humanity is able to take into its own hands the tasks of creating productive employment, overcoming poverty and achieving social integration. They constitute a model for a people-centred and sustainable form of societal organization, based on equity, justice and solidarity. CONCLUSION Cooperative is the middle way between the private and public sectors and has a distinct role to play in the economic development of the country through its emphasis on self-help. Cooperation is an important tool towards the decentralization of economic power in the country. Cooperation was the first step towards the goal of socialism. Stressing the role of cooperatives in bringing about a complete overhaul in the social set-up of the country, it is the only way for eliminating poverty and assuring an equal distribution of wealth. Cooperatives are essentially based on moral or ethical values. Cooperatives have to constantly work for the moral uplift of the society as a whole. Cooperative education includes education in Planned Parenthood family welfare. Cooperative policies have been oriented towards the poor. The Harijan, the caste Hindu, the Muslim and the Christian stood in the same queue to sell their milk. Distinctions disappeared in the queue. They saw the milk given by them was poured in the same can. The cooperatives help in the exchange of milk from the rural producers for cash of the urban consumers. Cooperatives could play an important role in maximizing production by making available the necessary credit and other productive requisites. It is not only in the rural areas that the cooperative movement should expand and increase the tempo of development. In view of rising prices and shortage of consumer goods, consumer cooperatives could play an ever increasing role in ensuring equitable distribution of essential goods and services at reasonable prices in urban areas. Cooperatives are playing an important role in maintaining the price list. IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 72

6 The milk cooperative network is owned by nearly 12 million farmer members. These producers are grouped in nearly 1,08,574 village-level dairy cooperative societies. The societies are grouped in 170 district-level unions spanning 338 district. The unions make up 22 state-level marketing federations. Milk reaches consumers in 750 towns and cities through the National Milk Grid network. Over the years, brands of dairy products created by the cooperatives have become known for quality and value. The Operation Flood (OF) programme implemented by the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) from 1970 to 1996 played the key role in bringing about the transformation in dairy development in the country. The OF programme established milk producers cooperatives in villages and made modern technology available to them. The broad objectives were to increase milk production ( a flood of milk ), augment rural incomes, and transfer to milk producers the profits of milk marketing that were hitherto enjoyed by well-to-do middlemen. Nearly 70 million Indian households hold a total of 98 million cows and buffaloes. A majority of milk producers have one or two milch animals, and these small producers account for some 70 per cent of the milk production. On average, 22.5 per cent of the income of rural households is contributed by milk. The World Bank audit shows that of the Rs.200 crores it invested in Operation Flood II, the net return into the rural economy has been a huge Rs.24,000 crores per year over a period of ten years, or a total of Rs.2,40,000 crores in all. No other major development programme has matched this inputoutput ratio. The World Bank Report 1997 said Operation Flood can be viewed as a twenty year experiment confirming Rural Development Vision. World Bank experts make another valid point that the total employment creation impact of 1,00,000 litres/day of dairy development activity is in excess of 12,000 new jobs. Dairy Development thus offers a great potential for employment generation which is a vital need in our country. REFERENCES 1) R.C.Dwivedi (1986), Role of Cooperatives in Socio-economic development, Dairy Cooperatives Glimpses of cooperatives through press, Coop. Times, New Delhi. 2) Operation Flood; 3) Operation Flood; Amul; Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers Union Ltd; White Revolution; 4) Operation Flood; National Dairy Development Board; english/genesis/operation-flood.aspx 5) IRJBM ( ) Volume No VII, December 2014, Issue 12 Page 73