From Sahakar to Shared Prosperity: A Cooperative Green Agenda for BRICS—Sundeep Kumar Nayak

When the 18th BRICS Summit convenes at Bharat Mandapam on 12 and 13 September, the grouping will be twenty years old, and India will be in the chair for the fourth time. The chairship theme reads: Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability. It is a neat acronym. It is also, if we choose to read it plainly, an agenda.

Because there is one institution that sits at the intersection of every one of those four words, and it is likely to be the least discussed item in New Delhi. It is the cooperative.

That would be a missed opportunity and an avoidable one.

The Question Nobody Asks About The Green Transition

The transition to a green economy is usually framed as a contest of technology and capital — who builds the cheapest cell, who mobilises the largest fund, and who commands the critical mineral. Both matter enormously. But there is a third question that determines whether any of it lasts: who will own the new assets?

If the answer is that solar farms, biogas plants, recycling chains and carbon revenues are owned by distant balance sheets while the farmer, the fisher, the waste picker and the forest-dweller remain suppliers of raw material and labour, then the green economy will simply reproduce the ownership pattern of the fossil economy in cleaner clothing. It may still reduce emissions. It will not command loyalty, and in democracies it will not survive its first political test.

Cooperatives answer that question differently. They aggregate people without expropriating them. They convert scattered demand into purchasing power, small production into marketable scale, and individual vulnerability into collective resilience. The member is simultaneously the supplier, the customer and the shareholder — which is precisely the structure a distributed energy system or a circular economy needs.

This is not a marginal sector. The International Cooperative Alliance counts roughly three million cooperatives worldwide with more than a billion members, providing work to some 280 million people — about a tenth of the world's employed population. The largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals alone report a combined turnover approaching USD 2.8 trillion. The United Nations designated 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives under the theme "Cooperatives Build a Better World" and has since set a ten-year framework for follow-through. Cooperatives are not a heritage sector. They are an under-used one.

India's Scale And India's Mantra

India brings something to this table that no other BRICS member can match: sheer density of cooperative membership. As of August 2026, the National Cooperative Database records about 8.54 lakh cooperative societies with 31.54 crore memberships — in credit, dairy, sugar, fertiliser, fisheries, housing, handloom, forestry, marketing, labour and consumer services. Maharashtra alone accounts for over seven crore memberships, Kerala for more than six crore.

The National Cooperation Policy 2025 has now given that base a direction. It aims to triple the cooperative sector's contribution to GDP by 2034, place a cooperative society in every village, and bring 50 crore citizens into active cooperative participation. Crucially, it opens the door to clean energy, biogas, waste management and technology — sectors in which Indian cooperatives have so far been marginal. Underpinning it is an unglamorous but decisive reform: nearly 80,000 primary agricultural credit societies have been sanctioned for computerisation, with over 63,000 already operating on a common national ERP platform, and the Tribhuvan Sahkari University has been established to professionalise a workforce that has historically been rich in members and poor in managers.

"Sahakar se Samriddhi" — prosperity through cooperation — is therefore not a slogan in search of content. It is a description of a development pathway in which people build prosperity together and retain a fair share of it. India's proposition to BRICS should be exactly that: not that others should copy Indian institutions, but that this principle travels.

I served as Managing Director of the National Cooperative Development Corporation between 2017 and 2022, and financing cooperatives at scale taught me three things that no policy document conveys. First, the binding constraint is rarely capital; it is bankability. Societies fail to raise money because they cannot show a market, a margin and a repayment source — not because lenders are hostile. Second, the money must go to the value chain, not the commodity. Financing more production without processing, storage, branding and logistics simply manufactures a glut. Third, registration is not enterprise. A country can add cooperatives to a register far faster than it can build businesses, and confusing the two is the single most common failure in this sector worldwide.

Brazil: The Cooperative As A Financial Institution

Brazil demonstrates what happens when cooperatives are allowed to become serious economic actors. According to Sistema OCB's 2026 yearbook, Brazilian cooperatives now have 29 million members—13.6 per cent of the population, up 12.5 per cent in a single year—with a turnover of R$848.4 billion, assets of R$1.6 trillion, and R$61.3 billion returned to members as surplus.

What matters for the green agenda is the credit cooperative. A smallholder may fully understand the economics of a solar irrigation pump, soil restoration or efficient storage and still be unable to finance it because a distant commercial lender cannot price a risk it cannot see. A member-owned financial institution rooted in the same municipality prices it differently. Brazil's development bank, BNDES, has for years channelled resources to rural producers and smaller enterprises through cooperative banks and credit unions, reaching well beyond the major urban centres. Meanwhile, Brazilian cooperatives have become significant developers of distributed generation, overwhelmingly solar. The lesson is compact: distributed renewables become genuinely inclusive when citizens are co-owners rather than merely consumers.

China: The Cooperative As A Service Layer

China illustrates a different strength — the capacity to place modern technology within reach of very small farms. Its supply-and-marketing cooperative system, coordinated by the All China Federation, supplies roughly 70 per cent of the country's fertiliser and records annual agricultural product sales exceeding 3 trillion yuan. In August 2026 China issued a fresh five-year plan with eighteen tasks to upgrade this system through 2030.

The instructive part is not the size of the numbers but the design. Drying, cold storage, machinery hire, crop monitoring, coordinated logistics and precise fertiliser application are all uneconomic for a single small farm and entirely economic when shared. The cooperative becomes the interface between the smallholder and the technology frontier — which is exactly the interface that climate-smart agriculture requires and that markets rarely supply on their own.

South Africa: A Just Transition And An Honest Warning

South Africa poses the hardest version of the question. Its green economy must simultaneously address unemployment and inequality, which makes the ownership question unavoidable.

Consider waste. South Africa's informal reclaimers — estimated at between 60,000 and 90,000, and by some counts far more — recover the great bulk of post-consumer packaging that reaches recycling. They reduce landfill burden, save municipalities real money and feed industry with material, yet remain among the most economically insecure workers in the country. The state's integration programme has begun registering them, and producer-responsibility organisations are now working to onboard cooperative entities so that service fees reach roughly 80,000 reclaimers through auditable, cashless payment. That is what formalisation through cooperatives looks like in practice: not a welfare transfer, but payment for an environmental service already being rendered.

South Africa's experience also carries a warning that BRICS should heed. Registering a cooperative is not the same as building a viable one. Without working capital, infrastructure, reliable offtake contracts and managerial support, a cooperative exists only on paper — and paper cooperatives discredit the real ones.

The Wider Circle

The expanded membership deepens the case. Indonesia has embarked on the most ambitious cooperative programme anywhere in the world, incorporating some 83,000 Koperasi Desa Merah Putih — a cooperative in every village — with tens of thousands built or under construction and a target of 40,000 operational by end-2026. It is also, candidly, a live experiment in whether speed and due diligence can coexist; independent academics have already flagged weak verification behind rapid loan approvals. BRICS would learn more from an honest exchange on that experience than from a dozen success stories.

Ethiopia's Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union federates 413 primary cooperatives representing over five and a half lakh farming families and has used certification and traceability to capture a premium that individual growers could never negotiate. Russia's Centrosoyuz network spans some 2,600 consumer societies with around 2.5 million shareholders across more than seventy regions, holding together rural retail and procurement in territories no commercial chain would serve.

Different histories, different legal forms, one common function: cooperatives are the institutional layer between the household and the state and between the small producer and the global market. The green transition will require aggregation on precisely that layer. Millions of farms must change practice. Millions of buildings must become efficient. Vast waste streams must be collected and sorted. Supply chains must carry verifiable traceability to satisfy tightening border requirements. Neither governments nor large corporations can perform these tasks household by household. Cooperatives can.

An Agenda For New Delhi

The Summit should consider a practical seven-point programme — modest in cost, high in signalling value.

One: a BRICS Cooperative Green Platform, linking apex bodies such as India's NCUI and NCDC, Brazil's Sistema OCB, the All China Federation, South Africa's cooperative agencies, Indonesia's cooperatives ministry and Russia's Centrosoyuz, with a mandate to identify investible projects — not to convene annual conferences.

Two: a dedicated cooperative window at the New Development Bank. Cooperative projects are small, dispersed and legally unlike corporations, which is why climate finance passes them by. A specialised window offering credit lines, partial guarantees and project-preparation grants, on-lent through national institutions such as NCDC, NABARD and BNDES, would fix a structural mismatch rather than subsidise a sector.

Three: one hundred demonstrator projects by 2030 — cooperative mini-grids and rooftop aggregation, biogas clusters, low-carbon dairy, farm-service centres, fisher-owned cold chains, community water systems and reclaimer-run material recovery facilities — each reporting financial and environmental results on a common template.

Four: comparable measurement. BRICS has no shared cooperative statistics. The recently approved international standards on cooperative statistics offer a ready basis for recording membership, women's and youth participation, employment, member incomes, renewable capacity, emissions avoided, water saved, waste recovered and land under sustainable practice.

Five: a BRICS cooperative digital marketplace for verified societies to discover partners, trade certified produce, share logistics and meet standards — designed so that member ownership of data is strengthened, not quietly transferred to intermediary platforms.

Six: a Cooperative Green Innovation and Training Network. The Tribhuvan Sahkari University, with its mandate to train eight lakh cooperative professionals annually, is a natural anchor. Fellowships should move young managers, auditors and women board members between BRICS cooperatives, because governance capacity is the scarcest input of all.

Seven: standing representation. A BRICS Cooperative Business Forum should feed into the agriculture, finance, energy, labour, MSME and climate tracks. Cooperatives should be treated as an economic constituency, not a ceremonial one.

The Proposition

BRICS can mobilise public finance, scientific capacity, natural resources and a very large share of world demand. Cooperatives contribute something the balance sheet cannot: trust, aggregation, local knowledge and shared ownership. They make climate action legible where people live — as a higher price at the farm gate, a lower electricity bill, a cleaner ward, a paid invoice for recovered plastic, and a job with dignity.

A green economy will endure only when people experience it as their economy. That is the whole of the argument, and it is not sentimental; it is the most practical observation in the field.

India should use this chairship to internationalise the spirit of Sahakar se Samriddhi. Prosperity through cooperation need not remain an Indian aspiration. It can become a BRICS proposition to the world — that sustainability moves faster and commands greater legitimacy when citizens are not passive beneficiaries of the green transition but active owners of it.

That would be a worthy message from Bharat Mandapam and a durable one.

About the Author: Sundeep Kumar Nayak is a former member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) who retired in the rank of Secretary to the Government of India. He was Managing Director of the National Cooperative Development Corporation (2017–2022) and Director General of the National Productivity Council, and served as elected Chairman of the UN-FAO promoted Network for the Development of Agricultural Cooperatives in Asia and the Pacific (NEDAC), Bangkok. He is Professor of Practice (Visiting) at IIT Goa. Views are personal.

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