In the dense sal forests outside Ambikapur, Surguja district, a 42-year-old Oraon tribal woman named Kamla Kerketta earned ₹38,000 last season selling dried mahua flowers — roughly three times what the local trader at the weekly haat would have offered her. The difference wasn’t luck. It was structure. A cooperative structure, built over years, that … Read more
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
In Dindori district’s Karanjia village, a Baiga tribal woman named Sukhiyabai earned ₹47,000 in a single season selling processed mahua flowers and sal seeds — nearly three times what middlemen paid her just four years ago. Her story is not an outlier. It is the direct result of a cooperative infrastructure quietly reshaping how India‘s … Read more
