Are cooperatives conducting Annual General meeting or Annual Children’s Day?

In the past few weekends, a number of event halls and banquets were booked. In Nepal, September is not even the month of wedding seasons and it has been quite some time that the festival of Teej has ended. However, a new festive season is being celebrated in the corporate world of the valley. It is the festive season of AGMs.

A number of cooperative organizations are organizing their Annual General Meetings (AGM)s in several event halls in the valley. An AGM can be a meaningful meeting to any organization if only the AGM can bring in quality discussion about company’s performances, issues of the company and future plans of the company. However, a number of AGMs being conducted lately do not depict a similar picture. The significance of AGM has been consistently degraded.

The AGM organized by these co-operatives have a number of honorary delegates on the stage. However, each one of them is either too busy to take pictures or too sleepy to doze off in his/her seats. The honorary delegates often show the least interest in the discussion going on. They rather portray as if they have been forced to be on the stage for next two hours.

Besides, the AGM hall usually looks like an Annual Children’s Day program where half of the guests come with their children to attend the meeting. No, the presence of children is not the problem of the meeting. However, an AGM is supposed to be handling questions and queries from members and discussing on the balance sheets, profit and loss, portfolios rather than being disturbed and distracted by the noises of few children screaming at one corner.

The AGM of cooperatives has simply become a trend to invite close friends and relatives moving away from the actual purpose of such AGMs. It looks like a meet and greet program which would not be a problem until and unless essential discussions were held. Usually, the audit member reads out the performance of the cooperative among the audience just as a grade one student narrates a paragraph among his/her classmates. The members are not even interested to follow the audit member. In fact, the statistics are read out and are left among the members to interpret on their own. The figures of the organization which holds their investment is being read out and the members have the least interest to show. The figures are read out in a way that the members should not even be interested to listen.

The major purpose behind establishing a cooperative is to encourage saving habits among general public. Moreover, cooperatives are designed to expand their financial horizon to the rural areas. However, the function of cooperatives has been limited to asking the closed wealthy ones to deposit their savings, celebrating birthdays of members and celebrating Teej programs. The true essence of cooperative that was to provide credit to the people who have fewer resources yet have zeal to start something has been lost as the focus is simply to expand their networks among the closed people.

It would not be wrong to say the members of the cooperative attend the AGM for food rather than the organization’s performance. In several AGMs, the delegates and members of the organization do not even care to discuss about the ongoing merger policy enacted by the NRB. Their future plans simply limit to making a better portfolio of the cooperatives without providing details on the how aspects.

Each and every cooperative might have its own way to conduct its AGM. Its desire to distribute prizes, and recognize the oldest member, the best performer and the highest SEE scorer might involve its own desire. However, overshadowing the main purpose of a cooperative and overshadowing the major discussions in AGM should not be where the cooperatives of the country be leading.

Such small changes are something that we all can initiate. Next time, if we attend an AGM, we can ensure that we understand the statistics presented by the cooperative. From the perspective of management body of a cooperative, we can ensure that our members understand the statistic that we are presenting. As an audience in the mass, we can ensure our children are not disturbing the pace of the program. As a member of a cooperative, we can ensure that our purpose behind out attendance in the AGM is to understand the ongoing operation and future plans of the cooperative. We are the same individuals who keep complaining for commercial banks’ interest rates and we are the same individuals who do not bother to understand what’s happening in the cooperative institute that holds our investment.