India is home to one of the largest cooperative movements on the planet, with over 8.5 lakh registered cooperative societies touching the lives of roughly 290 million members. Among these, agricultural cooperatives form the backbone of rural economic activity, handling everything from credit distribution and input supply to marketing, processing, and storage of farm produce … Read more
Generic health claims are losing their shelf power faster than most startup founders realise, and Seedlab’s Bootcamp 13 cohort is the clearest signal yet of where early-stage FMCG is actually heading. What strikes me about this latest round is not the individual brands — it is the explicit pivot in selection criteria, from broad wellness … Read more
A three-day programme that promises to turn raw business ideas into investor-ready pitches might sound familiar in the startup world. But when the entity behind it is Dubai‘s own SME authority, and the jury panel reads like a who’s who of the emirate’s commercial infrastructure, the initiative carries a different weight entirely. Dubai SME, the … Read more
Most small farmers in India own less than 2 acres of land and earn under ₹1.5 lakh a year. Yet, in 2026, a growing number of them are crossing the ₹5 lakh annual income mark — not because land prices changed, but because they finally learned how to stack government schemes together. The problem is … Read more
The Mondragon Corporation — a worker-owned industrial empire headquartered in the Basque Country of Spain — generates over €12 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 80,000 people, yet most economics departments spent three decades treating it as a curiosity rather than a model worth replicating. That indifference is ending, and the reasons reveal … Read more
A dairy farmer in Waikato, New Zealand, earns roughly NZD 8.50 per kilogram of milk solids from Fonterra in a good season. A dairy farmer in Sabarkantha, Gujarat, takes home approximately ₹55-65 per litre from her village cooperative linked to Amul. On paper, the Kiwi farmer looks wealthier. But strip away currency conversions, input costs, … Read more
India‘s cooperative movement has quietly built some of the most powerful business entities in the country, many of which rival private corporations in revenue and reach. I’ve spent years tracking the financial growth of these institutions, and the numbers in 2026 genuinely reflect how cooperatives have become pillars of India’s rural and semi-urban economy, touching … Read more
