The Cooperatives:

Prominent leaders of Indian freedom struggle ranging from from Mahatama Gandhi to Nehru as well as the socialists and communists, viewed co-operativization as important element in improving agriculture as well as the benefit the poor. Post-independence also cooperativization was seen as an important part of the agenda for institutional change in agriculture.

The Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee also known as Kumarappa Committee recommended in 1949 for state to be empowered to enforce varying degrees of cooperation for different types of farming. The First Plan adopted a judicious approach in recommending that small and medium farm should be encouraged and assisted to group themselves into cooperative farming societies. It was expected that village panchayats, motivated party workers and trained workers of the Community Development programme, launced in 1952, would be helpful in this context. The Second plan sounded optimistic note by emphasizing the need of taking essential steps laying foundation for the development of cooperative farming with the aim of bringing substantial proportion of agricultural land under cooperative farming over a period of ten years.

The Congress party in their 1959's Nagpur Session passed Nagpur Resolution which visualized an agrarian pattern based on Joint cooperative farming in the future, it specified that such a pattern was to be achieved within three years. However, leaders like C. Rajagopalachari, N.G. Ranga and Charan Singh opposed such move. Thus, Prime Minister Nehru assured the Parliament in February 1959 of not using any coercion to introduce cooperatives. Furthermore, as the idea of co-operative farming was sought to be promoted by citing China’s success in improving agricultural output through cooperativisation, Chinese aggression in Tibet in 1959 and later encroachments inside Indian border made the any idea based on the Chinese model suspect.

In light of such factors the idea of cooperative farming received a setback and the Congress put forward the idea of setting up service co-operatives all over the country. The Third Plan reflected change in position regarding cooperative farming, as it advocated modest a target of setting up ten pilot projects per district. Thus, gradually cooperative farming was sought to be made contingent on general agricultural efforts through the community development movement as well as the progress of cooperation in credit, marketing, distribution and processing.