On July 6, the Government of India announced the creation of a new Ministry of Co-operation. This is potentially a historic decision. Over 300 million people are members of around 800,000 co-operatives in India today. Over the years, co-operatives have taken on multiple avatars but our focus in this article is the credit co-operatives, whose significance for the rural poor cannot be overstated. Even till the early 1990s, co-operatives provided over 60 per cent of the total institutional credit to agriculture. Many also provide farm inputs and serve as outlets of the public distribution system for food and other essentials.
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