NEDAC Rural Voice Awards 2021

Kailash Choudhary, Union Minister of State (MoS) for Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare, presented the NEDAC Rural Voice Awards 2021 at the Rural Voice Agriculture Conclave in New Delhi on December 23. The awardees were the Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC), the Asia-Pacific Rural and Agricultural Credit Association (APRACA), the National Cooperative Bank Limited (NCBL) and Baljit Singh Redhu.

BAAC is a state-owned specialized financial service provider established in 1966. The broad objectives of the bank are to provide financial assistance to farmers, farmer associations and agricultural cooperatives to conduct agriculture and other agriculture-related businesses. Its vision is to be a secure rural development bank with modern management providing integrated financial services to sustainably enhance the quality of life of farmers.

APRACA was established under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization FAO. The first General Assembly meeting of APRACA was held in New Delhi on 14 October 1977 in conjunction with the third FAO-Asian Conference on ‘Agricultural Credit and Cooperatives’. The APRACA secretariat is located in Bangkok that supports its 87 systemically important member institutions in 24 countries of the region. APRACA is also engaged with international agencies like FAO, IFAD, UNCDF, World Bank and other development agencies/organizations to implement social capital formation for the vulnerable communities in the region.

Recipients of NEDAC- Rural Voice Award 2021 

NCBL was established in 2003 as the only bank in the cooperative movement of Nepal at the national level. It has been successfully carrying out the cooperative banking business for seventeen years. It was primarily established with the objective to meet the financial needs and launch different promotional activities to support its member cooperatives to be more professional and competitive. The establishment of NCBL, therefore, has a special implication for the development of the cooperative movement of Nepal since the promotion and strengthening of the cooperatives address the country’s major socio-economic deprivations — poverty, unemployment, inequality etc.

Baljit Singh Redhu is the Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of Lakshya Food. Son of Jagar Singh, he was born in a farmer family in 1963 in the small village Bohatwala in the Jind district of Haryana. He got his primary education in a village school and later he got his education in Jind. He got his diploma in Civil Engineering from Rohtak. He started his career by establishing a small hatchery in 1996 in his own village with 10,000 parent birds and attached the unemployed youth and farmers of the villages of Haryana.

A young, dynamic, down-to-earth entrepreneur, Redhu also established a modern dairy farm in his own village with the latest technology and equipment. His vision is to bring dairy farming, Murrah buffaloes and Haryana on the map of the world. He also established a milk processing plant in the village Kandela of Jind under the brand name Lakshya.  His aim was to provide pure-quality milk, milk products and ghee to the people of Haryana. Lakshya stands out among other milk plants owing to its strong backward and forward linkages. The procurement of raw milk occurs through multiple channels.