NEW DELHI: Union home and cooperation minister Amit Shah on Thursday released India’s new National Cooperative Policy that will promote the development of a “cooperative business ecosystem”, involving every village, and contribute to the country’s collective ambition of becoming developed by 2047.Idea behind the new policy, replacing the one made in 2002, is to transform cooperatives into professional and sustainable economic entities which can contribute significantly to the country’s GDP in the next 25 years.“The policy is far-sighted, practical and result-oriented,” said Shah while unveiling it whose mission is to “create an enabling legal, economic, and institutional framework that will strengthen and deepen the cooperative movement at the grassroots level”.“The target is to have at least one cooperative organisation in every village of the country,” said Shah, adding that the aim is also to bring in at least 50 crore people under the ambit of cooperatives and make them stakeholders in the equitable growth.India with more than eight lakh cooperative societies is currently home to more than one-fourth of the world’s cooperatives, with about one-third of its rural population directly connected to them as members for their diverse socio-economic needs.“There was a time when people used to say cooperation has no future. Today, I say the future belongs to cooperation only,” said Shah while emphasising on the importance of the sector in bringing crores of people into the economic activities.He said the new National Cooperation Policy aims to triple the cooperative sector’s contribution to GDP by 2034, bring 50 crore active members into the fold, and connect youth with employment opportunities.Emphasising that only the cooperative sector has the capacity to develop the nation’s economy inclusively with contributions from all 1.4 billion citizens, Shah said that the sector has a unique capability to pool small amounts of capital from many individuals to create large-scale enterprises. The new policy, prepared by a 48-member national-level committee headed by former Union minister Suresh Prabhu, has enlisted 16 objectives, grouped under six broad strategic mission pillars, to strengthen the cooperative movement at the grassroot levels during 2025-45.Developing five model cooperative villages in every ‘tehsil’ is one of the key objectives of the new policy. “Other villages in the district will be prodded and encouraged to first catch up with the model village, and subsequently aspire to become one of the best in the state,” said the policy paper.Under the objective of “development of a cooperative business ecosystem”, the policy lays a ground for developing at least one model cooperative village per district, centred around a multipurpose primary agricultural cooperative society (PACS) as the growth engine.The new policy has also put in place an institutional mechanism for monitoring its implementation. Under the mechanism, a ‘National Steering Committee on Cooperation Policy’, chaired by the Union minister of cooperation, will be constituted for overall guidance, inter-ministerial coordination, periodic policy review, etc.In addition, a national-level ‘Policy Implementation and Monitoring Committee’, chaired by the Union cooperation secretary, will be established for central-state coordination, troubleshooting implementation bottlenecks, periodic monitoring and evaluation.