Cooperative - IICTF

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

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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

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

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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

Cooperative Tourism in India: State-Run Alternatives to Private Hotels

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

Most travelers booking a hotel in India never pause to consider who actually owns and operates it. Yet across states like Kerala, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, cooperatively managed tourism ventures have been quietly offering clean, affordable, and community-driven accommodations for decades — and in 2026, their relevance is growing faster than ever. How Cooperative Societies … Read more

Cooperative Banking vs Commercial Banking: Pros and Cons

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

Choosing where to park your savings or apply for a loan is one of the most consequential financial decisions you can make, yet most people never pause to compare the two dominant models of banking available to them. I have spent years studying how cooperative and commercial banks operate, and the differences go far deeper … Read more

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

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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.

The Cooperative Movement That Quietly Feeds Half of India Every Morning

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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

The Pushkar Cooperative That Turned Camel Herders Into Leather Exporters

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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

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

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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

How Varanasi’s Handloom Weavers Cooperative Is Fighting Back Against Powerloom and Fast Fashion

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In a narrow lane off Madanpura in Varanasi, a pit loom clacks at a rhythm that has not changed in three centuries — but the man operating it earns less in a month than a food delivery rider earns in a week. I travelled to this ancient ghaat city in early 2026 to understand why Varanasi’s handloom weavers cooperative — once the backbone of a ₹3,000 crore Banarasi silk economy — is now locked in what members call an existential fight against powerloom duplicates and the ruthless economics of fast fashion.

Mohammed Irfan, a third-generation weaver in the Lohta cluster, showed me a kadhua brocade saree he spent 22 days weaving. His cooperative pays him approximately ₹8,500 for it. An almost-identical powerloom copy, produced in Surat in under four hours, retails on e-commerce platforms for ₹1,200. That single statistic tells you everything about the crisis — and the courage it takes to keep the loom running.

This Cooperative Runs a School Where No Child Has Ever Dropped Out

May 5, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In a dusty village about forty kilometres from Palanpur, Gujarat, a twelve-year-old girl named Revaben walks past her family’s buffalo shed every morning at 7:15 sharp. Her father pours milk into a collection can headed for the local dairy cooperative. She heads in the opposite direction — to a school that the very same cooperative … Read more