In January 2019, the secretary of a housing cooperative society in Pune’s Kothrud neighbourhood opened a tax demand notice for ₹3.8 lakh. Her society had collected monthly maintenance from 84 flat-owners for years — money that everyone understood moved from residents to the collective and straight back out as building services. Nobody had imagined it as a “supply of services.” Nobody had thought they needed a GST registration number. That envelope was the moment I first understood how completely the new tax architecture had unsettled India‘s cooperative sector.
How Shared Ownership Is Turning Workers Into Wealth Creators
In a small village outside Anand, Gujarat, a woman named Hansaben collects 14 litres of buffalo milk every morning and delivers it to her local dairy cooperative society. She earns roughly ₹8,400 a month from this alone. But here is the part most people miss — Hansaben is not just a supplier. She is a … Read more
