Cooperatives have historically been confined to agriculture and credit; critically evaluate their extension into urban mobility platforms through initiatives such as Bharat Taxi.

Indian cooperatives, constitutionally anchored in Article 43-B, have long been synonymous with dairy, credit and fertiliser. Their entry into app-based urban mobility through Bharat Taxi — run by Sahakar Taxi Cooperative Limited under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002 [3] — marks a promising but as yet unproven diversification into the platform economy.

Case for the extension

• Ownership replaces rent extraction: the zero-commission model lets Sarathis retain full fare earnings against a nominal platform fee, with drivers contributing ₹500 to become stakeholders and 80% of profits flowing to members [1][4].
• Social security for gig workers: members access health cover under PM-JAY, personal accident insurance and institutional credit via an SBI tie-up — filling the welfare vacuum of platform work [1][4].
• Democratic governance: elected driver representatives on the board convert contract labour into owner-participants, operationalising "Sahakar se Samriddhi" [2][3].
• Scale achieved quickly: from a Delhi-NCR and Saurashtra pilot [2], onboarding reached about 7.97 lakh Sarathis nationwide by July 2026 [1].

Grounds for caution

• Competition risk: entrenched, deep-pocketed private aggregators can outspend a cooperative on discounts and driver incentives [3].
• Capacity deficits: uneven digital literacy among driver-members constrains participatory governance and app-based operations [3].
• Geographic concentration: operations remain clustered in Delhi-NCR, Gujarat and Maharashtra, with tehsil-level reach still a three-year target [1][3].
• Governance legacy: multi-state cooperatives have historically faced politicisation and audit weaknesses — risks the 2023 amendment sought to address but which technology-intensive services magnify.

On balance, Bharat Taxi is a credible institutional innovation: it addresses the gig economy's ownership and social-security deficit more structurally than regulation alone can. Its success will hinge less on ideology than on execution — service reliability, professional management and member training. If sustained, it can extend the Amul model's lesson from milk to mobility, advancing decent work under SDG-8 through collective ownership.