Farmers: History of Cop-outs, Promise of a Co-op Policy

In 1946, Tribhuvandas Patel, a Gandhian close to Sardar Patel and Morarji Desai, went by foot from one village to another to create a cooperative of farmers chanting the mantra of collective action and collective good.

- SHANKKAR AIYAR Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India's 12 Digit Revolution, and Accidental India ([e-mail])

After months of campaigning, Patel collected a critical number to set up the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers’ Union. Verghese Kurien leveraged the model to establish the efficacy of cooperative action. But Kurien struggled for two decades to set up a national grid to usher in the milk revolution. India depended on imports in the 1950s. And in 2025, India’s Amul is competing in the global markets and its cheese is competing with Swiss brands.

The idea of cooperatives is not new and owes its origins in modern times to Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen. In India, cooperatives were visible in community ownership of resources known, for instance, as the Devarai and Vanarai movements. The formal structures came with the passage of the Cooperative Societies Act in 1904. Over the decades, cooperatives have suffered political piety and economic decimation. The history of India’s cooperative movement is pock-marked with cop-outs.

In 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru said everything else can wait but not agriculture. He declared cooperatives as a template for development. The success of Amul established the idea of cooperatives as a viable format, illustrated in Maharashtra where cooperatives steered change. Yet, vested political interests successfully rendered agriculture into a case of political charity and, verily, the killing fields.