When Amul distributed the equivalent of ₹72,000 crore back to its farmer-members in a single financial year, no private dairy conglomerate in India — not Nestlé, not the corporate arm of Mother Dairy — came close to matching that payout to the people who actually produced the milk. That number stopped me cold when I … Read more
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
Over 800,000 cooperative societies operate across India right now, touching the lives of nearly 290 million members — and yet most people I talk to have only a vague idea of how these organizations actually work. I spent years studying India’s cooperative movement, and I can tell you it remains one of the most powerful … Read more
