Enabling environment for cooperatives in India: a case study

Abstract

At the Rochdale Pioneers Museum in England, the following quotation is inscribed next to the Alliance Statement on the Co-operative Identity: “The co-operative ideal is as old as human society. It is the idea of conflict and competition as a principle of economic progress that is new. The development of the idea of co operation in the 19th century can best be understood as an attempt to make explicit a principle that is inherent in the constitution of society, but which has been forgotten in the turmoil and disintegration of rapid economic progress.” (ICA, 2015) The cooperative principles, which are the subject of the note the above quote was taken from, have been known internationally as the Rochdale Principles, but, as we found out during our interviews and conversations with multiple stakeholders involved in the cooperative movement in Gujarat and in the rest of India, such principles are immutable in some sense, both as a result of their simplicity, and a result of the like-mindedness of the “sisters and brothers” undergirding so many of these movements across the world.