Q.Explain the registration and membership related powers of the Registrar.

The first group of the Registrar's powers governs how a co-operative society is born and how it may later change its rules and structure.

The registration and membership powers form the first group of the Registrar's statutory functions, and they relate to the birth of a co-operative society and to the lawful reshaping of its rules and structure over its life. This is where the Registrar's role begins, because a co-operative society acquires its legal existence only through him.

The most basic and best-known power in this group is the power of registration. Under Sections 4, 6, 8, and 9 of the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act, 1960, the Registrar receives the application to form a society, scrutinises whether it has a genuine co-operative object (Section 4), whether it has the minimum number of eligible members (Section 6), and whether the application is properly made with lawful bye-laws (Sections 8 and 9), and then either registers the society and its bye-laws and issues the certificate of registration, or refuses registration by a reasoned order. Because a society comes into existence as a body corporate only on registration, the Registrar is, in effect, the officer who gives a co-operative society its legal birth.

His powers over the society, however, do not end with first registration. The Registrar also registers amendments to the bye-laws of a society. When a society wishes to change its bye-laws — for example, to alter its area of operation, its objects, or its share capital — the amendment normally takes legal effect only when it is registered by the Registrar, and he may refuse to register an amendment that is contrary to the Act or the Rules. Where the Act permits, he may even direct a society to make a necessary amendment. He deals with the classification of societies and with the fixing or alteration of their area of operation, and under Sections 17 and 18 he handles the amalgamation of two or more societies, the division of a society, the transfer of assets and liabilities, and proposals for the reorganisation of societies in the interest of the movement. …