India's cooperative-sector drive under the Ministry of Cooperation

The live thread: a cooperative-sector drive under a five-year-old ministry

India created a standalone Ministry of Cooperation on 6 July 2021, taking a mandate that had until then been handled inside the Ministry of Agriculture and giving it, in the Ministry’s own words, “a separate administrative, legal and policy framework for strengthening the cooperative movement in the country” (Wikipedia, drawing on the Ministry’s formation notification, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Cooperation). The organising slogan is “Sahkar se Samriddhi” — prosperity through cooperation. As of 2026-07-06 the Ministry has marked its fifth Foundation Day, reporting a cooperative base of roughly 8.4 lakh registered societies and around 30 crore members (the National Cooperative Database put membership at over 32 crore in its late-2025 accounting) across some 30 sectors (DD News Year-Ender 2025; ianslive.in, 6 July 2026).

The constitutional backdrop matters for how the drive is designed. Cooperation is a State subject, and the 97th Constitutional Amendment (in force from 2012) added Part IXB and made forming cooperatives a constitutional right (Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Cooperation). The central Ministry therefore acts mostly through central statutes covering multi-state societies, national federations, funding convergence and shared data — not by directly running state-registered cooperatives. That division is the fault line along which most of the debate about the drive runs.

Plank one: digitising and re-purposing Primary Agricultural Credit Societies

The most concrete workstream is the computerisation of Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS), the village-level credit cooperatives at the base of the pyramid. The project was first approved for about 63,000 PACS with an outlay of Rs 2,516 crore, and has since been expanded to 79,630 PACS with a revised budget of Rs 2,925.39 crore, funded by the Centre, states and NABARD (Ministry of Cooperation; DD News Year-Ender 2025). By late 2025 the Ministry’s figures showed 59,261 PACS actively using the common ERP software and 32,119 that had reached full “e-PACS” status, up from 47,155 on the platform in January 2025 (DD News Year-Ender 2025); the Ministry’s fifth Foundation Day account put around 50,000 PACS digitalised (ianslive.in, 6 July 2026). The exact live count varies by source, date and definition, so the figure is best read as “tens of thousands and rising.”

Alongside computerisation, the Ministry has pushed model bye-laws letting a PACS take on many more lines of business, and anchored the “World’s Largest Grain Storage Plan in the Cooperative Sector,” which the Union Cabinet approved in May 2023. That plan carries “no fresh outlay” of its own: it converges existing scheme funds — including the Agriculture Infrastructure Fund (Rs 1 lakh crore) and food-processing schemes — to build decentralised godowns at PACS, coordinated by an inter-ministerial committee chaired by the Cooperation Minister and drawing in the Ministries of Agriculture, Food Processing and Consumer Affairs/Food and Public Distribution (anantamias.com). By late 2025 the Ministry reported 112 PACS with completed godowns totalling about 68,702 tonnes of capacity under the plan’s pilot and rollout phases (DD News Year-Ender 2025).

Plank two: a new legal and institutional layer

The Multi-State Cooperative Societies (Amendment) Act, 2023 rewired the central statute governing societies that operate across state lines. Introduced in the Lok Sabha on 7 December 2022, it was passed by the Lok Sabha on 25 July 2023 and by the Rajya Sabha on 1 August 2023 (PRS Legislative Research). According to PRS, the Act creates a Cooperative Election Authority to conduct and supervise board elections of multi-state societies; provides for one or more Cooperative Ombudsmen to investigate member complaints, with inquiries to conclude within three months; sets up a Cooperative Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Development Fund financed by contributions from profitable societies to revive sick ones; and allows a state cooperative to merge into an existing multi-state society subject to a two-thirds member vote (PRS Legislative Research).

The institutional layer was extended in 2025 by the “Tribhuvan” Sahkari University Act, 2025, which converts the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA) in Gujarat into India’s first national university dedicated to cooperative education, training and research. The Lok Sabha passed the bill on 26 March 2025 and the Rajya Sabha on 1 April 2025, and it received presidential assent as Act No. 11 of 2025 (PRS Legislative Research; India Code; DD News). The university is named after the cooperative pioneer Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel and is intended to standardise cooperative training that state institutes currently deliver unevenly.

Plank three: national cooperatives for exports, organics and seeds

In 2023 the Ministry stood up three new national multi-state cooperatives to give the sector reach into markets it had not organised at scale: the National Cooperative Exports Limited (NCEL) for exports, the National Cooperative Organics Limited (NCOL) marketing under the “Bharat Organics” brand, and the Bharatiya Beej Sahkari Samiti Limited (BBSSL) for seeds (blog.lukmaanias.com). By its 2025 year-ender the Ministry reported that NCEL had exported about 13.77 lakh metric tonnes of agricultural commodities worth roughly Rs 5,556 crore while linking some 13,890 member PACS to export markets, that NCOL was marketing a first set of products through member societies, and that BBSSL had mobilised thousands of PACS for certified-seed multiplication (DD News Year-Ender 2025; blog.lukmaanias.com). These per-entity figures come from Ministry communications and have not been independently audited here, so they are attributed rather than asserted.

Dairy is handled through a parallel push branded White Revolution 2.0, which the Ministry describes as targeting a 50 per cent increase in cooperative milk procurement over roughly five years and reports tens of thousands of new dairy cooperative societies registered (indiancooperative.com). Financing for much of this flows through the National Cooperative Development Corporation (NCDC), whose loan disbursement the Ministry reported grew about 60 per cent in 2024-25 to roughly Rs 95,183 crore (DD News Year-Ender 2025).

Plank four: a twenty-year National Cooperation Policy

The framing document for the drive is the National Cooperation Policy 2025, unveiled on 24 July 2025 and running from 2025 to 2045 — the first refresh of national cooperative policy since 2002 (PIB, PRID 2146772). The policy is organised around six strategic pillars and, per government summaries, sets headline goals for the decade to 2034 including tripling the cooperative sector’s contribution to GDP, expanding active membership toward 50 crore, and establishing at least one cooperative society in every village (anantamias.com). These are policy targets stated by the government, not outcomes; this brief records them as stated and does not forecast whether they will be met.

Underpinning the policy is the National Cooperative Database, a mapping exercise the Ministry describes as covering upwards of 8.4 lakh cooperatives across some 30 sectors, used to plan interventions and, from 2025, to feed a cooperative ranking framework (blog.lukmaanias.com; DD News Year-Ender 2025).

The range of positions

The Ministry and its allied commentators present the drive as the first sustained central attention a historically fragmented sector has received: a dedicated ministry, a modern law, a data spine, professional education, and national federations that let small cooperatives reach export and organic markets (DD News Year-Ender 2025). On this view, PACS computerisation and the grain-storage plan turn village credit societies into multi-purpose rural hubs.

A distinct set of positions, visible in policy commentary, holds that because cooperation is a State subject, a strong central architecture — national federations, a central election authority, central databases — raises federalism questions about where power over cooperatives sits (anantamias.com). The same commentary flags execution risks familiar to the sector: uneven state capacity, governance and audit weaknesses in individual societies, and the gap between announced targets (tripling GDP share, 50 crore members) and the sector’s historical performance. Several of the most cited output figures — NCEL export volumes, e-PACS counts, new dairy societies — originate in Ministry communications and vary between sources and dates, which is itself a reason the independent verification status of the numbers is part of the story.

Who owns this topic (and why we’re here)

This topic is owned by the Ministry of Cooperation, the Union department created on 6 July 2021 and the seat of power over India’s cooperative sector. The drive touches several other seats of power: the Ministry of Agriculture, which held the cooperation mandate before 2021 and co-runs the grain-storage plan; the Ministry of Finance, through the sector’s tax treatment and (with the Reserve Bank of India) the regulation of cooperative banks; and the Ministry of Food and Public Distribution, through storage and the fair-price-shop role of PACS. IndiaStand maintains this brief because the cooperative-sector drive is one of the clearer cases of a new central institution reshaping a State-subject domain, and because the questions AI-search users ask about it — what the Ministry does, what the 2025 policy targets, what the 2023 law changed — map directly onto the entity dossier this brief sits beside.

Maintained topic brief. Analysis by IndiaStand — it characterises the state of play and the range of positions actually held, attributes each claim, and makes no forecast and no recommendation.