Bhubaneswar: Agriculture and cooperative society are inter-related and about 70 per cent of the farm loans are being provided by the cooperative societies which need to be promoted.
This was revealed by Food Supplies & Consumer Welfare and Cooperation Minister Ranendra Pratap Swain at a programme organised here Tuesday for distribution of recruitment letters to 23 new inspectors of cooperative societies.
“We must promote cooperative societies more and more and must try to reach out to more people,” said the minister.
“Eighty per cent of the farmers in the state belong to small and marginal categories and it is your responsibility to help them in get required loans from cooperative banks and interact with them personally,” the minister told the newly-recruited inspectors.
More than 9,000 cooperative societies are functioning across the state now. For paddy procurement and payment to farmers, the Cooperation department is providing the services of P-PAS (Paddy Procurement Automation System), an e-governance process, which has digitised all transactions in the mandis. The service has been appreciated and had received the much coveted national e-governance award for citizen-centric delivery for 2015-16, minister stated.
Swain also said that the aim of the department is to make the cooperative societies and cooperative banks fully computerised and the newly-recruited inspectors must have knowledge about the new technology.
The 23 new recruits were selected by Odisha Staff Selection Commission.
