Mumbai: The Mahayuti government on Monday decided to postpone the election process for nearly 35,000 cooperative institutions across the state until December 31. This decision has been made in light of the upcoming state assembly elections.
Maharashtra is known for its strong base for the cooperative institutions that includes sugar cooperatives, spinning mills, processing societies, district, urban and rural cooperative banks and credit societies, provide a backbone to the politics.
When most of the ruling party leaders were busy in preparations for the assembly polls, participation and concentration in the election programme for the cooperatives would have become embarrassing as it requires a lot of ground work, said an official requesting anonymity.
The state decision specifies that while the elections to 29,429 cooperatives were due in the ongoing financial year, the election was underway for over 7,000 cooperatives.
Now, the election programme would continue for institutions whose election schedule has been finalised with the specific orders given by the Supreme Court as well as the High Courts. Similarly, the cooperative housing with less than 250 members and those cooperatives where election of the chairman and vice chairman is pending will go ahead with the programme.
Excluding these, there are a large number of cooperatives that are from the sugar sector, banks, credit societies, labour cooperative societies whose elections are due. Since all party leaders have their interests to further political mileage, elections to such societies ahead of the state assembly elections were expected to be deferred, sources say.
The reason given by the state government is that the assembly elections require huge manpower, and accordingly, services of the officials from the state cooperative department needed to be reserved for this purpose.
Interestingly, the previous election programme scheduled in the month of June was postponed due to the monsoon until September 30.
