Building Sustainable Communities: A Reality Check on Performance of Fishermen’s Cooperative Societies in Tripura, India

The study was conducted in two purposively selected districts of Indian north-eastern state of Tripura viz. West Tripura and Gomati, during September, 2017 to February, 2018 with objective to examine the functional status of fishermen's cooperative societies in the light of financial performance vis-a-vis perception of the society members regarding their own societies. While from West Tripura district five active societies were pooled through list sampling, those were four in case of Gomati district. Primary data was collected from 189 respondents of which ordinary cooperative members were 169 as chosen through probability proportionate to size (PPS) sampling at 10% level of probability and twenty executive body members. Results revealed that merely 4.28% of the ordinary members were having good to very good level of awareness on their society activities. Though the fishermen's cooperative societies are supposed to offer some common benefits, 87.16% of the ordinary members expressed accrual of little to very little of any such benefits from their societies. Contrarily, 70.77% of cooperative functionaries had expressed accrual of high to very high level of benefits. Analyses of quinquennial trend of business reflected accumulation of a negative value of (-) 2.21 in terms of overall Net Profit Ratio of the studied cooperatives to indicate their sickly business performance. Again, barring only one, all the other remaining societies could not be found satisfactory contextual to quinquennial Efficiency Ratio signifying their incapability to use assets for generating income. As mark of challenge to the basic tenets of cooperative societies that repose faith on mutual-help, a meagre 8.84% of the ordinary members were detected to have their regular participation in various functional domains of cooperative societies. Garrett ranking identified 'casual approach towards timely disbursement of dividend/share of profit etc.', 'lack of transparency in fund management', and 'inadequate water area before hand for culture and fishing activity' to be the three topmost perceived deterring factors on the functional performance of societies in order of importance.