Tirupati: Efforts are on to strengthen Primary Agricultural Cooperative Societies (PACS) to widen their services to farmers for betterment of agriculture, stated district Collector Dr S Venkateswar.

Addressing the first meeting of the newly formed District Cooperative Development Committee at the Collectorate on Thursday, the Collector said both State and Central governments have embarked on a series of initiatives on the occasion of international cooperative year-2025 to strengthen cooperative sector under the theme ‘Cooperatives build a better a world’.

Accordingly, month-wise programmes were planned in this year to infuse new blood in the cooperative institutions towards sustainable development, he said. Particularly, gross root level PACS will be strengthened by total computerisation of all the PACS in the State to provide a wide range of services using technology in a transparent and effective way to farmers. As such every farmer should join as a member in the PACS to avail its services for development of agriculture.

The Collector said that the government departments allied with agriculture including horticulture, fisheries and animal husbandry should work together to see that all the government schemes reach the beneficiaries, that is farmers. He also wanted these departments to play an active role for the success of the cooperatives outreach campaign scheduled February 18 to 28 to create awareness among farmers and other sections on the benefits of cooperative sectors. District cooperative officer Lakshmi gave a detailed account on the month-wise programme planned during the international cooperative year-2025.

Later, Collector Venkateswar along with Joint Collector Subham Bansal and other officials released the international cooperative year poster.

Nabard DDM Sunil, DCCB CEO Narayana Swamy, Deputy CEO Zubeda Begam, District Agricultural Officer Prasad Rao, Nagaraju, Raju, Sumati and others were present.