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In a landmark move to reimagine one of India’s oldest economic pillars, Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah shall launch the National Cooperative Policy 2025, laying the foundation for a 20-year transformation of the country’s cooperative sector. The policy—unveiled at Atal Akshay Urja Bhawan in the capital—is being hailed as a generational reset for the over 8-lakh-strong cooperative ecosystem, anchoring its role in driving inclusive growth, grassroots entrepreneurship, and the national vision of Viksit Bharat 2047.

Drafted through extensive nationwide consultations and shaped by over 600 stakeholder inputs, the policy reflects a sweeping ambition: To modernize India’s cooperatives, professionalize their management, and embed transparency, innovation, and sustainability into their operating DNA. The policy is the culmination of work led by a 48-member expert committee chaired by former Union Minister Suresh Prabhu, and represents the most comprehensive reform agenda in the sector since the first National Cooperative Policy of 2002.

Speaking at the launch, Amit Shah described the initiative as “a structural shift in how India empowers its villages, catalyzes self-reliance, and ensures equitable prosperity through democratic, member-driven institutions.” He emphasized that the policy is not just a blueprint for cooperative institutions—but a national roadmap to unlock rural potential at scale.

At its core, the policy is aligned with the Ministry of Cooperation’s foundational philosophy: “Sahkar se Samriddhi”—Prosperity through Cooperation. It positions cooperatives as engines of rural transformation, capable of delivering credit, inputs, services, and markets in a decentralized, participatory manner. By focusing on professional capacity building, digital integration, financial discipline, and policy convergence, the policy aims to make cooperatives future-ready in an era marked by climate risks, rising rural aspirations, and technology-led disruption.

Unlike past frameworks that largely defined cooperative governance and compliance, the 2025 policy emphasizes institutional competitiveness—urging cooperatives to evolve beyond legacy limitations and reposition themselves as entrepreneurial, value-creating entities across agriculture, dairy, housing, logistics, textiles, and renewable energy.

The document lays out a sequenced vision for the sector from 2025 to 2045, with clearly defined goals around structural modernization, gender inclusivity, capital access, technology adoption, and inter-state cooperation. Special focus areas include scaling successful cooperative models, enabling cross-sector federations, and ensuring climate and sustainability readiness through green finance and circular practices.

Critically, the policy also outlines the need for a more converged regulatory architecture, aligning cooperative governance with India’s broader economic, social, and digital transformation agenda. By enabling cooperatives to tap into central schemes, financial markets, and digital public infrastructure, the government aims to bridge the gap between traditional cooperative structures and 21st-century growth engines.

The timing of the policy launch is significant. As India aims to become a developed economy by 2047, rural empowerment and participatory enterprise models will be essential to ensure the benefits of growth are equitably shared. With the cooperative movement reaching over 30 crore Indians, its reform is not just sectoral—it’s national.

The National Cooperative Policy 2025 thus marks more than just an administrative milestone. It signals India’s intent to invest in grassroots institutional capacity as a core lever of nation-building—reimagining cooperatives not as legacy relics, but as frontline players in India’s development decade.