Largest

Punjab’s MARKFED Is India’s Largest State Cooperative — So Why Have Most Indians Never Heard of It?

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Punjab's MARKFED Is India's Largest State Cooperative — So Why Have Most Indians Never Heard of It?

In the winter of 2024, a wheat farmer in Mansa district told a reporter from a Chandigarh daily that he had sold grain to “the government” every rabi season for nineteen years — and had never once heard the word MARKFED. Yet it was MARKFED that issued his payment, MARKFED that ran the mandi procurement centre, and MARKFED that moved approximately ₹25,000 crore worth of grain through Punjab’s cooperative supply chain in a single year. I find this paradox endlessly fascinating: India‘s largest state-level cooperative marketing federation operates at a scale that dwarfs most listed FMCG companies, and yet it occupies almost zero space in public imagination.

This isn’t just a branding failure. It’s a window into how India’s cooperative infrastructure — vast, essential, politically entangled — remains invisible to the very people it serves. And if you care about the future of Indian agriculture, MARKFED’s story demands attention.

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Why the World’s Largest Economies Are Quietly Embracing Cooperatives Again

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Why the World's Largest Economies Are Quietly Embracing Cooperatives Again

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

Top 10 Largest Cooperatives in India by Turnover

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Top 10 Largest Cooperatives in India by Turnover

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

How Kerala’s Kudumbashree Cooperative Network Became the Largest Women-Run Cooperative in Asia

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How Kerala's Kudumbashree Cooperative Network Became the Largest Women-Run Cooperative in Asia

In a small rented room in Alappuzha district, a woman named Sreelatha once counted ₹47 in weekly savings collected from nine neighbours. That was 2001. Today, that same neighbourhood group manages a catering micro-enterprise turning over ₹12 lakh annually. I find her story remarkable not because it is unique — but because it has been replicated approximately 3.06 lakh times across every single ward in Kerala. This is the quiet, staggering mathematics of what cooperative mobilisation can achieve when women hold the ledger.

I have spent years covering India‘s cooperative sector for IICTF, and no model has fascinated me more than Kudumbashree — a name that translates to “prosperity of the family” in Malayalam. With over 4.5 million women members as of 2026, it is not merely Kerala’s pride; it is the single largest women-run cooperative network anywhere in Asia. Yet most Indians outside Kerala have only a vague sense of what it actually does or how it works. That gap deserves closing.

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Edible Blooms Builds Australia’s Largest Gifting Marketplace With $100 Million in Annual Sales by 2026

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Edible Blooms Builds Australia's Largest Gifting Marketplace With $100 Million in Annual Sales by 2026

Four gifting brands, one marketplace, and a 43 per cent growth forecast: that is the commercial logic behind Edible Blooms’ latest consolidation play in Australia’s online gifting sector. I’ve been watching this category fragment for years, and this move is the clearest signal yet that the hamper and gifting space is entering a platform phase. … Read more