Embracing Innovation: The Rise of New Age Co-operatives

When most people think of cooperatives in India, they picture AMUL’s dairy network or the village-level credit societies that have long served rural communities. But cooperatives are no longer confined to agriculture and banking. A new wave is emerging – one that is tackling healthcare access, reimagining tourism, powering homes with renewable energy, and building digital platforms owned by workers themselves. These are the new age cooperatives: enterprises that retain the timeless cooperative values of democratic ownership and shared benefit while addressing distinctly contemporary challenges.

What makes a cooperative “new age”? 🔗

The term “new age cooperative” does not refer to a legal category. It describes cooperative models that have moved beyond traditional sectors to address gaps in healthcare, clean energy, sustainable tourism, gig work, and the digital economy. Research on platform cooperativism in India identifies the key shift: where corporate platforms concentrate profit with investors, cooperative platforms return governance and earnings to the workers and users who actually create value. The underlying principles – democratic control, member benefit, social concern – remain unchanged. What changes is the terrain on which those principles are applied.

India’s National Cooperative Policy 2025, launched in July 2025, explicitly recognises this evolution. Among its six strategic pillars, the policy calls for expanding cooperatives into new and emerging sectors such as green energy, organic farming, health, and tourism, and for making cooperatives “future-ready” through the adoption of AI, IoT, and blockchain technologies. This is a significant policy signal: the government is not just preserving the old cooperative architecture but actively encouraging its expansion into sectors that were barely imaginable when the first cooperative credit societies were formed in 1904.

Healthcare cooperatives: a community-owned alternative 🔗

India’s healthcare system faces a persistent tension between affordability and quality. Private hospitals are often inaccessible to low-income groups, and public health infrastructure remains stretched. Healthcare cooperatives offer a third path – community-owned, democratically governed, and surplus-reinvesting.

Lok Swasthya, founded in 1990 and growing out of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Ahmedabad, is India’s first women-led health cooperative. It runs 24-hour pharmacies, produces Ayurvedic medicines, and operates SEWA Shakti Kendras – community health literacy centres that train women to understand their health rights and navigate public services. The model is not just about treatment; it builds long-term health literacy among informal workers. In Assam, the Assam Healthcare Cooperative Society takes a different approach, negotiating with partner hospitals and diagnostic centres on behalf of members to reduce out-of-pocket medical expenses by up to 40%.

At the national policy level, the Ayushman Sahakar scheme of the National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC), operationalised in 2020 in consonance with the National Health Policy 2017, provides financial assistance to cooperative societies to create, upgrade, and manage healthcare facilities. The scheme also encourages the integration of AYUSH systems and digital health platforms, signalling a pluralistic approach to community health governance. Globally, the model has proven its worth: International Cooperative Alliance research estimates that more than 100 million households worldwide have benefited from healthcare cooperatives, demonstrating the scalability of the model across income levels and geographies.

Why healthcare cooperatives work 🔗

Unlike corporate hospital chains, healthcare cooperatives do not distribute surplus to external shareholders. All revenue is reinvested for member benefit, healthcare quality, and technological improvement. This fundamentally changes incentive structures. Members are more likely to seek preventive care because they have a stake in the institution’s financial health. At the same time, democratic governance ensures that services reflect the actual needs of the community being served, not the preferences of distant investors.

Tourism cooperatives: local ownership of local resources 🔗

Tourism is one of India’s fastest-growing economic sectors, but its benefits have historically flowed away from the communities that host visitors. New age tourism cooperatives attempt to correct this imbalance by ensuring that local communities own and manage tourism enterprises.

The Vanalaxmi Women Tree Grower’s Cooperative in Gujarat’s Mehsana district, organised by SEWA in 1986, began as a collective agriculture project for landless women workers. After years of cultivating arable land, the cooperative has recently added eco-tourism as a revenue stream – a natural extension that brings visitors directly to the productive landscape the members themselves created. This model of community-led eco-tourism keeps earnings within the cooperative while offering visitors an authentic rural experience.

More broadly, development analysts at the World Bank have observed that sustainable tourism models leveraging eco-tourism, digital platforms, and climate-smart infrastructure can maximise economic benefits and direct job creation while preserving cultural and natural heritage. This is precisely the logic that cooperative tourism models operationalise at the grassroots level. When the community owns the enterprise, it has a direct incentive to preserve the natural and cultural assets that attract visitors in the first place.

India’s Union Budget for 2025-26 has further catalysed this space. Government tourism initiatives are now targeting eco-tourism destinations in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Araku Valley, and the Western Ghats, creating an enabling environment within which cooperative tourism enterprises can operate and grow. The overlap between government-designated tourism corridors and cooperative enterprise potential is significant.

Platform cooperatives for mobility and gig workers 🔗

One of the most innovative applications of the cooperative model in tourism and transport is the platform cooperative. Yatri, operating as part of the Kochi Open Mobility Network project, is a digital platform cooperative for taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers in Ernakulam district. Drivers who join the cooperative society gain access to the platform, with all governance remaining in the hands of the members. With over 2,200 auto-rickshaw drivers enrolled, Yatri represents a direct challenge to the extractive economics of conventional ride-hailing apps. Unlike Uber or Ola, a platform cooperative does not siphon a percentage of every fare to distant shareholders – the drivers themselves collectively own the infrastructure through which they work.

Energy cooperatives: collective power, literally 🔗

The energy sector presents one of the most compelling opportunities for new age cooperatives, particularly as India pursues its target of 500 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030. Solar cooperatives are emerging as a practical mechanism to bring clean energy to communities that individual households or small farms cannot electrify on their own.

The solar cooperative model works by pooling resources among multiple landowners or rooftop owners to install a shared solar system. Revenue from electricity generated is distributed among members based on their investment. Research on rooftop solar in India documents a concrete example: farmers in Tamil Nadu forming a cooperative to install a 100 kW rooftop solar system that generates stable income from energy sales while the group shares maintenance responsibilities. This model is especially practical in rural and semi-urban areas where land ownership is dispersed and individual capacity to invest in solar is limited.

Cooperatively owned solar microgrids are also providing electricity to remote villages that remain off the national grid due to difficult terrain or low population density. Beyond household power, solar-powered cold storage units managed by farmer cooperatives allow produce aggregation and flexible market timing – farmers can hold tomatoes, onions, or potatoes until prices improve rather than selling immediately after harvest. This directly improves farmer incomes while cutting post-harvest food waste.

Globally, scholarly literature on energy communities and cooperatives identifies citizen participation as the defining feature of successful energy cooperatives. In these models, members are simultaneously energy producers and consumers – a dynamic captured by the term “prosumers.” Democratic decision-making ensures the cooperative pursues social, sustainable, and economic goals in tandem, rather than optimising for any one metric alone.

Technology and the cooperative future 🔗

What truly distinguishes new age cooperatives is their relationship with technology. Rather than treating digital platforms as a threat that concentrates power in corporate hands, new age cooperatives are using technology as a tool for democratic empowerment. India’s PACS are now being designated as delivery points for retail energy distribution and social-impact-linked digital market platforms – showing how village-level cooperative infrastructure can be connected to the digital economy.

The National Cooperative Policy 2025 takes this further by integrating cooperative products with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) and the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), allowing cooperative produce to reach national and global buyers. Academic analysis of the policy notes that it promotes cooperative-to-cooperative (C2C) trade and professional management – a shift that moves cooperatives from being welfare organisations to becoming competitive market players who operate on cooperative values rather than despite them.

India also has its first cooperative university: Tribhuvan Sahakari University, established in 2025 in Anand, Gujarat, offering courses in cooperative law, finance, and management. The National Cooperative Policy 2025 aims to prepare two million cooperative professionals over five years – creating the human capital that new age cooperatives will need to operate effectively in complex, technology-driven sectors.

Challenges that new age cooperatives must navigate 🔗

The emergence of new age cooperatives does not mean the path ahead is without friction. Several structural challenges persist. Capital access remains limited – cooperative member shares are capped, and external financing is often restricted, making it difficult for cooperatives to scale at the pace that sectors like renewable energy demand. Digital literacy gaps mean that platform cooperatives in rural areas struggle to onboard members who lack smartphones or reliable internet access. Fragmented state laws create compliance burdens for cooperatives that seek to operate across state boundaries, despite the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (Amendment) Act 2023 having introduced some harmonisation. And political interference in cooperative governance continues to undermine democratic functioning in some states.

None of these are insurmountable, but they do require deliberate policy attention, professional governance, and sustained member participation – the very attributes that distinguish a thriving cooperative from a failing one.

The significance of new age cooperatives for India 🔗

New age cooperatives matter beyond their individual sectors. They demonstrate that the cooperative model is not a historical artefact suited only to milk collection or credit disbursement. It is a living, adaptive legal and organisational form that can be applied wherever people have a shared need and the willingness to govern collectively. In healthcare, they bring services to those the market overlooks. In tourism, they keep value within the community that creates it. In energy, they enable collective investment in infrastructure that no individual household could afford alone. In the gig economy, they give workers democratic ownership of the digital platforms through which they earn their living.

With cooperative membership in India already spanning nearly 32 crore people across 30 sectors, the foundation for new age cooperative growth already exists. What is changing is the ambition – and the policy support – to extend that foundation into the sectors that will define India’s economy in the coming decades.

What do you think? As platform-based gig work continues to grow in India, can cooperative ownership of digital platforms genuinely challenge the dominance of corporate apps – or does scale always require external capital that dilutes cooperative values? And in a country where healthcare remains deeply inaccessible for many, should the government prioritise funding healthcare cooperatives as a third pillar alongside public and private healthcare systems?

References

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