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

March 29, 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.

How Rajasthan’s Women Dairy Cooperatives Are Quietly Out-Earning the Men in Rural Households

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In a dusty village called Bansur in Alwar district, a woman named Kamla Devi walks to the milk collection centre every morning at 5:30 AM, balancing two steel canisters on her head. She pours approximately 14 litres of buffalo milk into the cooperative’s bulk cooler, collects her digital receipt, and walks home — having already earned more that day than her husband will from his rain-dependent mustard crop all week. Across Rajasthan, this scene is repeating itself in thousands of villages, and the numbers tell a story that few policy reports have bothered to narrate properly.

I have been tracking India’s cooperative movement for years, and what is unfolding in Rajasthan’s dairy sector deserves serious attention. Women members of dairy cooperatives in the state are now contributing, on average, ₹8,000 to ₹12,000 per month to household income — figures that frequently surpass what male family members bring in from traditional agriculture. This is not a government press release talking point. This is a quiet economic revolution happening one milk canister at a time.

The Cooperative That Employs 80,000 People With No CEO — Mondragón vs IFFCO Explained

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In the rain-soaked hills of Basque Country, Spain, a factory worker casting engine parts earns no less than one-sixth of what the highest-paid manager takes home — and that manager was elected by the very workers on the shop floor. Meanwhile, in Kalol, Gujarat, a marginal farmer holding two bighas of land collects his subsidised bag of Nano Urea from the local society, blissfully unaware that his purchase traces back to one of the world’s largest fertiliser cooperatives headquartered over a thousand kilometres away in New Delhi. Two cooperatives. Two continents. Two radically different answers to the same question: can ordinary people govern an enterprise worth billions?

I have spent years covering India’s cooperative sector for IICTF, and no comparison sharpens the ideological fault lines of the movement quite like placing Mondragón Corporation beside IFFCO (Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited). One has no CEO and lets workers vote on salaries. The other has a Managing Director, a government-linked board, and serves over 35,000 member cooperatives across India. Both are wildly successful. Both claim the cooperative identity. Yet their DNA could not be more different.

A Dalit Cooperative in Marathwada Did What No Government Scheme Could — Broke the Moneylender’s Grip

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In Kaij taluka of Beed district, a landless Dalit sugarcane cutter named Bhimrao Waghmare once paid ₹60,000 in interest on a ₹25,000 loan he had taken three years earlier from a local moneylender. By the time I visited this corner of Marathwada in early 2024 while reporting on agrarian credit, Bhimrao had not only cleared that debt — he had a savings account, a crop loan at 4% interest, and a small poultry unit financed entirely through a Dalit-led cooperative credit society. No government scheme had managed to reach him. A cooperative run by his own community did.

This is not an isolated anecdote. Across Marathwada’s eight districts, a quiet revolution in cooperative credit has been unfolding among Dalit communities — one that challenges everything we assume about who gets to participate in India’s cooperative movement. I have spent months tracking these stories, and what I found deserves far more attention than it has received.

How Andhra’s Cooperative Aquaculture Sector Made Krishna District the Shrimp Capital of India

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In Nagayalanka mandal, at the southern tip of Krishna district where the river meets the Bay of Bengal, a 62-year-old farmer named Ramaiah tends to 12 acres of shrimp ponds that earn him more than his rice paddies ever did. His cooperative society — one of over 400 fishermen cooperatives scattered across Andhra Pradesh — negotiated a collective input price for Vannamei shrimp seed that saved each member approximately ₹15,000 per acre per cycle in 2026. I first heard about Nagayalanka’s transformation from a colleague covering rural Andhra, and the numbers stunned me enough to dig deeper.

What I found was not a single success story but an entire economic ecosystem — one where cooperative aquaculture has quietly turned a coastal district into the engine room of India’s ₹52,000 crore shrimp export industry. Krishna district alone accounts for an estimated 30-35% of Andhra Pradesh’s total shrimp output, and the state itself produces roughly 70% of India’s farmed shrimp. Those are not small numbers. They represent a cooperative-driven revolution that most of India has barely noticed.

IFFCO Was Born in Gujarat — Here’s the Untold Story of How It Became the World’s Largest Fertiliser Cooperative

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

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.

Nobody Told Cooperative Society Members This About the 97th Constitutional Amendment

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In the summer of 2012, a dairy farmer in Anand district, Gujarat, was told by a local cooperative officer that his society’s board could no longer have more than 21 directors. The farmer — a member of his village milk cooperative for over fifteen years — had never heard of the 97th Constitutional Amendment. Nobody explained what it meant for his voting rights, his access to audited accounts, or the five-year election cycle that was now supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution itself. A decade later, most cooperative society members across India still do not know what this amendment promised them, and fewer still know that the Supreme Court struck down its most critical provisions.

I have spent years covering India’s cooperative movement, and this remains one of the most consequential — yet least discussed — legal developments affecting over 29 crore cooperative members nationwide. Let me walk you through what actually happened, why it matters in 2026, and what every cooperative member deserves to understand.

Co-optex Has 65,000 Weavers and Zero Venture Capital — Tamil Nadu’s Cooperative That Silicon Valley Can’t Explain

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In a small cement-floored shed in Kanchipuram district, a woman named Lakshmi operates a pit loom that is older than most startups’ founding documents. She earns approximately ₹9,000 a month weaving silk sarees — each one taking four to twelve days — and she has never heard the phrase “series A funding.” Yet the organisation that buys her fabric, markets it across India, and deposits money into her bank account operates at a scale that would make many venture-backed D2C brands envious. I find that irony impossible to ignore.

That organisation is Co-optex — formally known as the Tamil Nadu Handloom Weavers’ Co-operative Society — and it connects roughly 65,000 weavers across the state to consumers through a network of showrooms, exhibitions, and increasingly, digital channels. It has no equity investors, no cap table, and no Silicon Valley pitch deck. It runs on membership fees, government support, and the sheer stubbornness of a model that was born in 1935.

Maharashtra’s Sugar Cooperatives Don’t Just Make Sugar — They Make Chief Ministers

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In Sangli district’s dusty town of Walwa, a single sugar factory controls more than sweetness — it controls who gets elected to the state assembly, who gets a bank loan, and whose son gets a government job. I have spent years tracking India’s cooperative movement, and nowhere is the entanglement between cooperative economics and raw political power more visible than in Maharashtra’s western sugar belt.

This is not a story about agriculture alone. This is the story of how a network of roughly 200 cooperative sugar factories across Maharashtra became the most effective political machine in Indian democracy — one that has produced at least seven chief ministers, dozens of cabinet ministers, and an entire class of rural oligarchs who straddle the worlds of farming, industry, and governance simultaneously.

How GST Quietly Rewrote the Rules for Every Cooperative Society in India

March 28, 2026 by Naresh Garg

In January 2019, the secretary of a housing cooperative society in Pune’s Kothrud neighbourhood opened a tax demand notice for ₹3.8 lakh. Her society had collected monthly maintenance from 84 flat-owners for years — money that everyone understood moved from residents to the collective and straight back out as building services. Nobody had imagined it as a “supply of services.” Nobody had thought they needed a GST registration number. That envelope was the moment I first understood how completely the new tax architecture had unsettled India’s cooperative sector.