'Sahakar Se Samriddhi' represents a shift in India's approach to cooperative-led development. Discuss with examples.

The creation of a separate Ministry of Cooperation in 2021 gave the slogan 'Sahakar Se Samriddhi' — prosperity through cooperation — institutional form. It marks a move away from treating cooperatives as a state-confined credit-and-agriculture instrument towards building them as professionalised, digitally enabled national enterprises competing in modern service markets.

Nature of the shift

• From welfare to enterprise: cooperatives now enter platform services, not only credit and dairy. Bharat Taxi, India's first cooperative-owned digital mobility platform registered under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002, is the clearest instance [1].
• From beneficiary to owner: the "Sarathi-owner" model makes drivers shareholders with profit-sharing and board representation, replacing the commission-based "partner" relationship of private aggregators [1].
• From local to multi-state scale: multi-state registration lets a cooperative operate nationally, breaking the historic confinement of cooperatives to one state's jurisdiction [1].
• From paper to digital: PACS computerisation converts village societies into multi-service digital nodes.

Illustrative examples

• Bharat Taxi, launched nationally on 5 February 2026, uses a zero-commission, surge-free pricing model as an indigenous alternative to foreign-capital aggregators [2]; its Jaipur rollout in July 2026 had drawn over 30,000 Sarathis and nearly 7 lakh customers [3].
• e-PACS digitisation in Rajasthan — around 5,650 PACS computerised, enabling crores of online transactions — shows the same professionalising logic in the rural credit arm [3].
• Diversified PACS running three or more business lines demonstrate cooperatives moving beyond single-function credit delivery [3].

Limitations

• Operational scale remains modest against entrenched private platforms.
• Success depends on avoiding the movement's older weaknesses — elite capture, weak professional management and thin capital.

The shift, then, is one of ambition and design rather than mere rebranding: cooperatives are being repositioned as vehicles of dignified livelihood and equitable ownership. If matched by transparent governance and sustained member education, this model can advance both Article 43B's mandate and SDG-8's goal of decent work.