How Shared Ownership Is Turning Workers Into Wealth Creators

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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

What Your Cooperative’s Audit Grade Actually Says About Its Financial Health

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What Your Cooperative's Audit Grade Actually Says About Its Financial Health

In a small office in Sangli district, Maharashtra, the secretary of a dairy cooperative stared at a single letter on a government form — “C” — and wondered if it meant the end of his society’s ₹14 lakh NCDC loan application. Across the country, thousands of cooperative administrators receive audit grades every year without fully … Read more

The Sambhar Lake Salt Cooperative Is One of India’s Oldest — and Most Forgotten — Success Stories

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The Sambhar Lake Salt Cooperative Is One of India's Oldest — and Most Forgotten — Success Stories

Somewhere on the cracked, white-crusted flats west of Jaipur, a 62-year-old Kharwal salt worker named Magan Lal scrapes crystallised salt into a mound with a wooden tool his grandfather once used. He earns approximately ₹180 for a day that begins before sunrise and ends when the Rajasthan heat becomes physically dangerous. His cooperative membership card … 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

How to Register a Multi-State Cooperative Society in India

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How to Register a Multi-State Cooperative Society in India

Cooperatives that operate across state boundaries face a unique regulatory challenge — they cannot simply register under a single state’s cooperative law. If you have ever wondered how organizations like IFFCO, NAFED, or Amul manage operations spanning multiple Indian states under one unified legal entity, the answer lies in a specific central legislation that I … Read more

Can a Cooperative Society Own Agricultural Land? The Answer Depends on Your State

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Can a Cooperative Society Own Agricultural Land? The Answer Depends on Your State

In Sangli district, Maharashtra, a dairy cooperative with 1,200 members spent nearly three years trying to purchase 14 acres of agricultural land for a fodder cultivation unit. They had the funds — approximately ₹85 lakh pooled from member contributions and an NCDC subsidy. They had the willing seller. What they did not have was legal … Read more

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

Leading Brands Back unspun’s Automated U.S. Apparel Manufacturing With Millions in New Funding

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Leading Brands Back unspun's Automated U.S. Apparel Manufacturing With Millions in New Funding

Automated production that converts yarn directly into a semi-finished garment in minutes — compressing dozens of discrete cut-and-sew steps into a single programmable cycle — is no longer confined to a pilot facility. unspun is moving its AI-enabled 3D weaving technology toward commercial deployment inside the United States, and it has retail-level commitments to back … Read more

IFFCO Was Born in Gujarat — Here’s the Untold Story of How It Became the World’s Largest Fertiliser Cooperative

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IFFCO Was Born in Gujarat — Here's the Untold Story of How It Became the World's Largest Fertiliser Cooperative

In the summer of 1966, a groundnut farmer in Mehsana district, Gujarat, watched his crop wilt — not from drought, but from the sheer impossibility of buying fertiliser at a price he could afford. That year, India imported nearly 60% of its fertiliser requirement, and private traders in rural Gujarat marked up prices by margins that made farming a losing bet. I have spent years covering the cooperative sector, and no origin story fascinates me quite like what happened next — how that farmer’s desperation became the seed for an institution that now serves over 35,000 cooperative societies and touches the lives of approximately 50 million Indian farmers.

The institution I am talking about is Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO), registered on 3 November 1967. What most people do not know is that IFFCO was not a government project imposed from Delhi. It was a grassroots demand, channelled through cooperative networks in Gujarat, that eventually convinced policymakers to back one of the boldest experiments in India’s agricultural history.

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How GST Quietly Rewrote the Rules for Every Cooperative Society in India

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How GST Quietly Rewrote the Rules for Every Cooperative Society in India

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.

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