Story

The Amul Story Keeps Repeating Itself — And That’s a Beautiful Thing

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The Amul Story Keeps Repeating Itself — And That's a Beautiful Thing

When a small group of farmers in Anand, Gujarat handed their milk cans to a barely-organized cooperative in 1946, they weren’t launching a brand — they were staging a revolt. That act of collective defiance against exploitative middlemen became the seed of what is now India‘s largest food products organization, one whose annual turnover has … 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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The Untold Story of How Cooperative Societies Rebuilt Post-Flood Kerala

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

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

The Story of a Village That Refused to Sell to Big Corporates

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The Story of a Village That Refused to Sell to Big Corporates

In the summer of 2019, a private dairy company sent representatives to Rajsamand district, Rajasthan, offering ₹32 per litre for buffalo milk — nearly ₹5 above the local rate. The village of roughly 900 households could have taken the deal. They didn’t. Instead, the gram sabha met under a neem tree, debated for three hours, … Read more