33. Strengthening cooperatives and Farmer Producer Organizations
Status: Key measures taken to strengthen cooperatives include setting up a union ministry of cooperation to focus exclusively on cooperative development, onboarding cooperative societies on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM portal) as buyers, making village-level primary agricultural credit societies (PACS) multipurpose and computerised, relief to cooperative societies in various income-tax laws, and setting up new national level multi-state societies for exports, seeds and organic farming. On the FPOs front, however, the government has launched a programme to set up 10,000 FPOs in five years to let farmers benefit from the scale of economies. About 7600 FPOs have been registered under the scheme till Dec 2023. i ii iii