Producer Organisations often need continuous hand holding support to emerge as viable and effective organizations and quite often this kind of support is not available,argues Dr Utpal Barman
Dr Utpal Barman is Associate Professor at the Department of Extension Education, Assam Agricultural University, Jorhat, India. The author can be contacted at barman.utpal@gmail.com
Farmers in India are fragmented on the basis of caste, creed, region and language. Therefore, small groups are more successful. Such small groups, like AMUL can be federated to form larger groups. To manage a large federation requies versetile leadership. Against this backdrop the attempt made in this paper is very praise worthy.
Interesting to know, by 2011, the Department of Agriculture, Government of Assam had organized about 1.8 million farmers in 25,938 FMCs and within a year i.e by 2012, almost 95 per cent FMCs were defunct. This necessitates analysis of reasons of failures. Sometime investigating failures is far more important to get ideas for improvement than focusing on success stories.As a way forward, Capacity building of extension personnel has been suggested on high priority to play the role of facilitator. We surely need to improve our capacities to deal with issues concerning Producer organizations. It is one good effort to bring forward the ground reality of the POs- many of which are utter failures amid many successful ones congrats for a good case study