Digitisation of PACS to be complete by this year-end or Jan 2025: Cooperation Secretary

Cooperation Secretary Ashish Kumar Bhutani on Tuesday said the digitisation of all Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) will be completed by the end of this year or January 2025.

The ministry is geared up to procure maize at Minimum Support Price (MSP), he said and urged all maize farmers to register themselves on the farmers' portal for procurement by the National Cooperative Consumer Federation (NCCF) and National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India (NAFED) under the Ethanol Blending Programme.

This will be beneficial for both farmers and the Ethanol Blending Programme, an official statement said.

Addressing a stakeholder consultation meeting with top officials of national federations, the secretary said: "The ministry will complete the digitisation process of all PACS in the country by the end of this year or January 2025".

The consultation on digitisation of PACS focused on bringing all the functional PACS onto an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) -based common national software, linking them with Nabard through state cooperative Banks and district central cooperative banks.

So far, proposals to computerise 67,930 PACS from 30 states and Union territories have been sanctioned under the project.

As of August 30, a total of 31,301 PACS across 29 States/ UTs have been onboarded on the ERP software and 21,477 PACS have gone live. 54,654 PACS have received hardware for digitisation.

A central share of Rs 654.23 crore has been released to the states/UTs for procurement of hardware, digitisation of legacy data and establishing a support system, while Rs 141 crore has also been released to Nabard under the project.

To make PACS into viable business entities, the government has framed model bylaws to make cooperatives multipurpose entities undertake economic activities in various fields, ranging from agriculture and allied activities to distribution of petroleum products, fertilisers and seeds.

The government has taken steps to further strengthen PACS by incentivising farmers to produce maize and pulses. It has been decided to procure the full produce of pre-registered farmers producing maize and pulses, at minimum support prices.

The government plans to establish viable cooperatives in every Panchayat with a focus on developing 2 lakh new PACS as dairy and fishery cooperatives within five years.