Competitive Strategies for Indian Agri-Business Cooperatives - A Perspective for the Next Decade

Inspite of the current rhetorics on the concept of ‘Swadeshi’, the increasing trend towards liberalisation and globalisation can neither be wished away, nor is it feasible and profitable at this juncture to completely insulate the country from global competition. At the same time there is no point in becoming panicky or over-enthusiastic about globalisation and liberalisation and giving away a simple ‘walk-over’ to the MNCs and the WTO. The crying need of this hour is to strengthen the basis of a civil society and one of the necessary devices to achieve this objective is to build up and implement competitive strategies for farmer-owned cooperative and cooperative-like organisations following on the examples of most developed countries of the world. Only a balanced approach between these two extreme viewpoints can offer the scope for a healthy development of the Indian economy. The Indian society must be given the opportunity for holding a free and fair play between the MNCs and the Indian business. The present paper attempts to illustrate this point by spelling out competitive strategies for Indian agri-business cooperatives, which constitute a major chunk of India’s economic activities with vast potential for growth and employment creation.