The much-awaited National Cooperation Policy (NCP) 2025 was dedicated to the nation by the Union Home and Cooperation Minister on July 24, 2025. The NCP is essential to outline a complete, realistic, modern, and all-inclusive framework to realise our Prime Minister’s mantra of Sahakar-se-Samriddhi (prosperity through cooperation). Cooperatives have empowering effects on communities. More than 8.5 lakh cooperatives contribute evocatively to the country’s socio-economic development by supporting grassroots-level, member-driven collectives and enhancing self-reliance, especially among artisans, farmers, and micro- and small entrepreneurs.
NCP & Viksit Bharat
The NCP seeks to emphasise the emerging need for holistic development through approaches to inclusivity, socio-economic accountability, and transparency. It deliberates on the vision, mission, goals, and thrust areas while outlining the strategies and implementation plans. It also establishes a supportive legal, institutional, and operational framework to promote sustainable cooperative and collective enterprises. The policy emphasises India’s collective ambition to realise the dream of Viksit Bharat by 2047. It focuses on creating an enabling socio-economic environment and offers a framework for cooperation and collaboration with shared responsibilities and exchanges of knowledge and resources across eclectic sectors and stakeholders.
Cooperatives possess tremendous potential to evolve into globally competitive entrepreneurial entities. In addition to ensuring effective leadership for growth with community development through diversified cooperatives, it is essential to identify competitiveness parameters, extend support for enhancing competitive strengths, facilitate professional management within cooperatives, guarantee the quality of goods and services, and assure customer satisfaction. Leveraging community participation and bringing in modern technological interventions are essential for cooperatives to be resilient, business smart and future-ready. This necessitates drawing up a transparent, responsible, and accountable matrix for all stakeholders to promote professionalism in operations and leadership throughout the lifecycle of cooperatives.
Cooperatives and Inclusive Growth
Under India’s constitution, the NCP recognises the formation of cooperative societies as a fundamental right and advocates the swift transformation of the sector by strengthening and deepening the cooperative movement. In this context, we must outline sustainable growth pathways for collective enterprises aiming to deepen the cooperative movement, create vibrancy in the ecosystem, expand and diversify activities for emerging and profitable ventures, attract youth and women’s participation, and transform cooperatives into modern, technology-enabled, vibrant, and responsive business entities.
The NCP admits the significance of the values of cooperation, self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equity, equality, and solidarity. The need of the hour is to make the stakeholders aware of the core principles of cooperation—voluntary participation, democratic decision-making, autonomy, member economic participation, cooperation among cooperatives and collective enterprises, capacity building, and concerns for community. Understanding the meaning of cooperation would help us register the pan-India spread of cooperatives and collective enterprises by encouraging member and leadership management, professionalism and by adopting the best national and international practices in the sector.
Reforms in Cooperatives
The NCP has extensively outlined various short-term, medium-term, and long-term facilitatory provisions aimed at the rapid expansion of the cooperative movement. To put these into effect, extensive coordination with the state/UT governments is a must. Cooperation is a state subject. Considering the enormous variations in objectives of various state/UT-specific cooperative Acts/Rules/procedures, these need to be reviewed, and amendments need to be brought in immediately to create a conducive legal and regulatory environment. Further, a review of the existing legal framework for cooperative development is essential to identify processes and procedures for implementing reforms that enhance autonomy, promote transparency and good governance, and expand the cooperative movement. This includes ensuring increased participation from women, youth, socially disadvantaged groups, artisans, landless workers, labourers/fishermen, and both the rural and urban poor in cooperatives.
The need of the hour is to bring in an effective and progressive human resource policy in cooperatives not only for good governance in these grassroots democratic entities but also to ensure active member engagement and guarantee technology push and entrepreneurship development. Ensuring an increase in active membership without compromising cooperative principles requires the formation of cooperatives in new and evolving sectors, viz. solar energy, biomass, mini-hydro power, irrigation, drone services, organic farming, AI-based crop management, digital platforms for ride-sharing, e-commerce, logistics, health and wellness, waste management and recycling, eco-tourism, education and skill development, fintech, and supply chain and value chain activities. The diversity in these emerging areas demands efforts to handhold cooperatives in recognising, designing, developing and implementing respective development plans.
Need for Stakeholder Consultation
Although the NCP committee consulted all stakeholders while drafting the policy, further provision-specific discussions and deliberations are inevitable for outlining action plans with target dates for governance reform, operational effectiveness and charting immediate and future need-based development. We need to recognise the challenges faced by cooperatives in the evolving economic space to make them kinetic, competitive and profitable business entities and to provide them with a level playing field.
The NCP is not just a strategic enabler of Viksit Bharat @ 2047 but a timely intervention to transform cooperatives into engines of sustainable, technology-driven, comprehensive, and community-led growth. Through the planned spread of sabka cooperatives, it rightfully endorses our Prime Minister’s clarion call—Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas, and Sabka Vishwas. The aim is to deepen these cooperatives as a true people-based movement reaching up to grassroots. Only with active consultation and collaborations with stakeholders led by respective states/UTs, the golden provisions of the NCP are all set to remove the existing difficulties faced by the sector. If implemented with right earnest, the provisions contained in NCP would facilitate an environment where professionalism is encouraged, ease-of-doing business is confirmed, end-to-end digitisation is effected, and welfare programmes are functionally converged and integrated so as to contribute substantially to India’s gross domestic product during Amrit Kaal (2025-2047).
Prabhu is an ex-Union Minister and the Chairman of National Cooperation Policy Committee. Tripathy is Joint Secretary in the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.
NCP & Viksit Bharat
The NCP seeks to emphasise the emerging need for holistic development through approaches to inclusivity, socio-economic accountability, and transparency. It deliberates on the vision, mission, goals, and thrust areas while outlining the strategies and implementation plans. It also establishes a supportive legal, institutional, and operational framework to promote sustainable cooperative and collective enterprises. The policy emphasises India’s collective ambition to realise the dream of Viksit Bharat by 2047. It focuses on creating an enabling socio-economic environment and offers a framework for cooperation and collaboration with shared responsibilities and exchanges of knowledge and resources across eclectic sectors and stakeholders.
Cooperatives possess tremendous potential to evolve into globally competitive entrepreneurial entities. In addition to ensuring effective leadership for growth with community development through diversified cooperatives, it is essential to identify competitiveness parameters, extend support for enhancing competitive strengths, facilitate professional management within cooperatives, guarantee the quality of goods and services, and assure customer satisfaction. Leveraging community participation and bringing in modern technological interventions are essential for cooperatives to be resilient, business smart and future-ready. This necessitates drawing up a transparent, responsible, and accountable matrix for all stakeholders to promote professionalism in operations and leadership throughout the lifecycle of cooperatives.
Cooperatives and Inclusive Growth
Under India’s constitution, the NCP recognises the formation of cooperative societies as a fundamental right and advocates the swift transformation of the sector by strengthening and deepening the cooperative movement. In this context, we must outline sustainable growth pathways for collective enterprises aiming to deepen the cooperative movement, create vibrancy in the ecosystem, expand and diversify activities for emerging and profitable ventures, attract youth and women’s participation, and transform cooperatives into modern, technology-enabled, vibrant, and responsive business entities.
The NCP admits the significance of the values of cooperation, self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equity, equality, and solidarity. The need of the hour is to make the stakeholders aware of the core principles of cooperation—voluntary participation, democratic decision-making, autonomy, member economic participation, cooperation among cooperatives and collective enterprises, capacity building, and concerns for community. Understanding the meaning of cooperation would help us register the pan-India spread of cooperatives and collective enterprises by encouraging member and leadership management, professionalism and by adopting the best national and international practices in the sector.
Reforms in Cooperatives
The NCP has extensively outlined various short-term, medium-term, and long-term facilitatory provisions aimed at the rapid expansion of the cooperative movement. To put these into effect, extensive coordination with the state/UT governments is a must. Cooperation is a state subject. Considering the enormous variations in objectives of various state/UT-specific cooperative Acts/Rules/procedures, these need to be reviewed, and amendments need to be brought in immediately to create a conducive legal and regulatory environment. Further, a review of the existing legal framework for cooperative development is essential to identify processes and procedures for implementing reforms that enhance autonomy, promote transparency and good governance, and expand the cooperative movement. This includes ensuring increased participation from women, youth, socially disadvantaged groups, artisans, landless workers, labourers/fishermen, and both the rural and urban poor in cooperatives.
The need of the hour is to bring in an effective and progressive human resource policy in cooperatives not only for good governance in these grassroots democratic entities but also to ensure active member engagement and guarantee technology push and entrepreneurship development. Ensuring an increase in active membership without compromising cooperative principles requires the formation of cooperatives in new and evolving sectors, viz. solar energy, biomass, mini-hydro power, irrigation, drone services, organic farming, AI-based crop management, digital platforms for ride-sharing, e-commerce, logistics, health and wellness, waste management and recycling, eco-tourism, education and skill development, fintech, and supply chain and value chain activities. The diversity in these emerging areas demands efforts to handhold cooperatives in recognising, designing, developing and implementing respective development plans.
Need for Stakeholder Consultation
Although the NCP committee consulted all stakeholders while drafting the policy, further provision-specific discussions and deliberations are inevitable for outlining action plans with target dates for governance reform, operational effectiveness and charting immediate and future need-based development. We need to recognise the challenges faced by cooperatives in the evolving economic space to make them kinetic, competitive and profitable business entities and to provide them with a level playing field.
The NCP is not just a strategic enabler of Viksit Bharat @ 2047 but a timely intervention to transform cooperatives into engines of sustainable, technology-driven, comprehensive, and community-led growth. Through the planned spread of sabka cooperatives, it rightfully endorses our Prime Minister’s clarion call—Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas, and Sabka Vishwas. The aim is to deepen these cooperatives as a true people-based movement reaching up to grassroots. Only with active consultation and collaborations with stakeholders led by respective states/UTs, the golden provisions of the NCP are all set to remove the existing difficulties faced by the sector. If implemented with right earnest, the provisions contained in NCP would facilitate an environment where professionalism is encouraged, ease-of-doing business is confirmed, end-to-end digitisation is effected, and welfare programmes are functionally converged and integrated so as to contribute substantially to India’s gross domestic product during Amrit Kaal (2025-2047).
Prabhu is an ex-Union Minister and the Chairman of National Cooperation Policy Committee. Tripathy is Joint Secretary in the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)
