Cooperative Stories

Your Cooperative Chairman Is Corrupt — Here’s the Legal Way to Remove Him

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Your Cooperative Chairman Is Corrupt — Here's the Legal Way to Remove Him

Last monsoon, in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra, a dairy farmer named Ramesh Jadhav watched his Primary Agricultural Credit Society (PACS) chairman approve a ₹14 lakh fertiliser contract with his own brother-in-law’s supply firm. Fourteen members knew it was wrong. Not one knew what to do about it. I’ve heard versions of this story from Rajasthan … Read more

This Tribal Cooperative in Bastar Has Outlived 78 Years of Government Schemes and Still Runs

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This Tribal Cooperative in Bastar Has Outlived 78 Years of Government Schemes and Still Runs

Somewhere in the sal forests south of Jagdalpur, a 62-year-old Muria Gond woman named Sukhmati carries a headload of tamarind and mahua flowers to a collection centre that her grandmother also walked to. The centre belongs to a cooperative that was registered in 1948 — just months after India‘s independence — and against every reasonable … Read more

The Business Model That Made Ordinary Farmers Feel Like CEOs

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The Business Model That Made Ordinary Farmers Feel Like CEOs

In Sangli district, Maharashtra, a turmeric farmer named Ramesh Patil sits at the head of a long wooden table, reviewing a quarterly balance sheet worth ₹14 crore. He never finished college. His father worked as a daily-wage labourer. Yet every month, Patil and eleven other elected board members make procurement decisions, negotiate prices with bulk … Read more

The Cooperative Movement That Quietly Feeds Half of India Every Morning

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The Cooperative Movement That Quietly Feeds Half of India Every Morning

Before most of India wakes up, a chain of 3.6 million dairy farmers has already set the morning in motion. Every glass of milk, every cup of chai, every cube of butter on a breakfast plate carries the quiet fingerprints of one of the most consequential economic experiments any democracy has ever attempted — and … Read more

Odisha’s Tribal Cooperative Movement Is Sitting on ₹15,000 Crore of Forest Resources — Most Untapped

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Odisha's Tribal Cooperative Movement Is Sitting on ₹15,000 Crore of Forest Resources — Most Untapped

In a weekly haat in Koraput district, a Kondh tribal woman named Kamala Majhi spread out her sal seeds, dried mahua flowers, and hill broom grass on a plastic sheet last monsoon. A middleman offered her ₹8 per kilogram for sal seeds — the same seeds that, once processed into sal butter, fetch ₹300 per … Read more

Why Young Indians Are Leaving Corporate Jobs to Join Cooperatives

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Why Young Indians Are Leaving Corporate Jobs to Join Cooperatives

Last monsoon, Priya Sharma, a 28-year-old MBA graduate from Pune, walked out of a Rs 18-lakh-per-year consulting job at a Big Four firm. Three months later, she was standing ankle-deep in a turmeric field in Sangli district, Maharashtra, helping onboard 340 smallholder farmers onto a cooperative’s new digital procurement platform. She had taken a 40% … Read more

40 Auto-Rickshaw Drivers in Pune Built a Cooperative — Now Ola and Uber Have a Problem

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40 Auto-Rickshaw Drivers in Pune Built a Cooperative — Now Ola and Uber Have a Problem

Somewhere in Pune’s Kothrud neighbourhood, a man named Raju Shinde used to earn roughly ₹900 a day ferrying passengers through the city’s chaotic traffic. That was before Ola and Uber slashed fares and flooded his routes with incentivised drivers. By 2023, his daily take-home had dropped to ₹500 on good days, and nearly 25% of that vanished into app commissions. Then, in early 2024, Shinde and 39 other auto-rickshaw drivers in his locality did something that most gig economy observers didn’t see coming — they registered a cooperative society under the Maharashtra Cooperative Societies Act and launched their own ride-hailing service.

I first heard about this initiative through a cooperative sector contact in Maharashtra, and frankly, I was sceptical. A forty-member auto-rickshaw cooperative going up against billion-dollar platforms? It sounded like a headline designed for social media sympathy, not a sustainable business. But the more I dug into it, the more I realised this wasn’t a stunt. It was a structural response to a structural problem — and it carries lessons for the entire cooperative movement in India.

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The Untold Story of How Cooperative Societies Rebuilt Post-Flood Kerala

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The Untold Story of How Cooperative Societies Rebuilt Post-Flood Kerala

When the floodwaters finally retreated across Kerala in August 2018 — the worst inundation the state had witnessed in 94 years — the damage bill had already crossed ₹31,000 crore, more than 480 people were dead, and over a million had been displaced from fourteen of the state’s fourteen districts. Government helicopters and military boats … Read more

The Pushkar Cooperative That Turned Camel Herders Into Leather Exporters

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The Pushkar Cooperative That Turned Camel Herders Into Leather Exporters

Somewhere on the sandy periphery of the Pushkar Camel Fair in 2019, a Raika herder named Bhawani Ram sold his last female camel for ₹8,000 — roughly the price of a mid-range smartphone. His family had maintained a herd of forty camels across three generations in Ajmer district, Rajasthan. By that winter, he was down … Read more

Maharashtra’s Sugar Cooperatives Don’t Just Make Sugar — They Make Chief Ministers

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Maharashtra's Sugar Cooperatives Don't Just Make Sugar — They Make Chief Ministers

In Sangli district’s dusty town of Walwa, a single sugar factory controls more than sweetness — it controls who gets elected to the state assembly, who gets a bank loan, and whose son gets a government job. I have spent years tracking India‘s cooperative movement, and nowhere is the entanglement between cooperative economics and raw political power more visible than in Maharashtra’s western sugar belt.

This is not a story about agriculture alone. This is the story of how a network of roughly 200 cooperative sugar factories across Maharashtra became the most effective political machine in Indian democracy — one that has produced at least seven chief ministers, dozens of cabinet ministers, and an entire class of rural oligarchs who straddle the worlds of farming, industry, and governance simultaneously.

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