Advanced Course on Managing Farmer Producer Organizations

Collectivising is recognised as way forward for addressing many of the problems farmers of India are facing. India is the home of small and marginal farmers who nearly account for 85% of the people depending on agriculture and roughly half of Indian population. The last mile delivery of support services and first mile aggregation of produce are not only cumbersome but very expensive.  In addition, lack of infrastructure, access to resources etc makes things worse. The best way to address the problem is build collectives of producers and collectives of these collectives and establish support systems so that the communities can manage their livelihoods themselves.

India has a long history of cooperative movement from Gandhian times. The most successful experiment was the AMUL in Gujarat with dairy farmers. However, the Primary Agricultural (Credit) Cooperative Societies (PACS) were caught in party and caste politics and couldnt’ raise to the occasion as expected. In this context, various reforms were introduce to fee the cooperatives from political and bureaucratic interventions and build community business enterprises.  The legislations like Mutually Aided Cooperative Societies Act, 1995 by Govt of AP, Producer Companies Act by Government of India helped to establish more and more Community Institutions. The women self help group movement across the states were possible due to formation of such collectives.  NABARD, SFAC, NCDC tried to form such farmers institutions over last few years.

This initiative got boost with Government of India coming up an ambitious target of forming 10,000 Farmer Producer Organisations in the next five years and establish all support systems through Cluster Based Business Organisations.  Government also have announced several schemes and policy changes to enable the formation and strengthening of FPOs across the country.

One of key constraint is the lack of trained human resources and access to support services. Towards this Centre for Sustainable Agriculture with a long experience in formation and managing FPOs has come with plan to create an ecosystem (http://www.fpohub.com) for building robust Farmer Producer Organisations.

This course targets to build capacities of the CEOs of the FPOs, NGO staff, Government Officials on formation and managing FPOs, developing robust business plans, dealing with legal compliances etc.

The training includes nearly 25 hours of self learning modules including live case studies, 15 hours of interactive sessions by experts helping to understand the concepts, strategies, cases better.