Dehradun, Jan. 10 -- Now that the Amit Shah led Ministry of Cooperation has taken up an ambitious target of setting up two lakh cooperative societies, it is important to ensure that even as the milestones are achieved in quantitative terms, the focus on marginal and small farmers is not to be diluted - for they constitute the vast majority of the 145 million farmers in the country. In fact it would not be wrong to say that they are the actual bulwark for the food security in the country. However, even though their access to institutional support has improved over the last decade, there is much more that can still be done.
Therefore, one important intervention could be to link the existing 1.08 lakh housing societies and the proposed 92 lak...