Being a social animal, it is human nature to stay together, work together & help each other. And when it comes to Indians, we strongly believe in social life, which starts from a family. Indian still believes in joint family, care, affection & respect are amongst those many threads which knits the strong family bonding. Few such family creates neighborhood, neighborhood becomes city. This is how society flourishes.

To keep society together some common entities are must, & to run those entities participation of every individual is required. For living of family, all its member must work on different level. In Indian families, adult male works to earn money, female looks after family's nursing etc. Elders passes their knowledge to family, while young ones learns to become next family in charge. Simply, family can only survive with contribution of all its members. This is what called, cooperative.
"Cooperative means a business owned and controlled equally by the people who use its services or by the people who work there."

In India, idea of cooperation conceived in the beginning of 20th century, by Agriculture Cooperative societies Act of British Raj. Many corrections were made by British government to improve this act. Independence played role of catalyst in growth of cooperation. In early 60s it evolved to become a gigantic movement. Till the end of the 20th century, this movement got diversified well. Cooperative movement became a backbone of Indian economy. It covered agriculture, health, banking, industry, housing, consumer stores, electricity distribution & many prominent sectors of economy.

In its golden era, coop movement served as a source of enthusiasm to Indian economy. It's mammoth growth caused uplifting of almost all the segments of society. To grow this movement further, government encouraged people by offering loans, guarantees, subsidies, etc.

These subsidies, top posts, money attracted politicians towards it. Many politicians jumped into the movement, & literally hijacked it. Coop movement became learning ground for politicians, & source of recurring money. In Maharashtra, almost 60% of coop establishments are controlled by NCP, 30% by Congress.

Cooperative movement is basically a citizen centered initiative but what we see generally is organizations popped up by governmental support. The average member is unaware of what is happening at the decision-taking level where a few gather to control the lever of powers. It defeats the basic purpose of cooperative initiative.

Subsidies & other goodies by government meant to boost the coop movement. In coop movement profit is shared by its share holders, & its equally distributed amongst them. But whenever it makes any loss, it is supposed to be absorbed by the movement itself. Those establishments stop working due to losses. Government supports them with additional loans, so that those establishments can resurrect. Unfortunately, managing body (usually politicians) engulfs the profit, manipulates it to loss. Loss making establishments stops working. Managing body seeks stimulus package from government, & it is easy to manage such packages from government since politicians are on the body. After few cycles again they takes all profit away. This is how coop movement dies.

More than 35% coop establishments succumbed to bankruptcy in Maharashtra in last decade only. This is the beacon for the coop movement.

Till date, many such establishments became bankrupt, hence dysfunctional. Property of many poor investors is decaying.  Many more are being sacrificed for benefit of politicians. Whenever I travel within my district, I find many such dysfunctional establishments like sugar factories, ginning mills, distilleries, banks, etc. Those establishments are not just a buildings, they are fossils of hard earned money of investors, they were the witness of unity of people of lower segment. They were source of daily bread & butter of its laborers. Dream of the visionaries. I see them with a respect as an abandoned relics of their golden era.