💸 Economy & FinanceMAINS · GS3.1

Bharat Taxi: cooperative ride-hailing platform

India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform, owned by its driver-members — the Sarathis — and run under the Ministry of Cooperation.

What happened

In a Lok Sabha reply, the Union Minister of Cooperation set out the structure and progress of Bharat Taxi — described as India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform.
The platform was registered under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002, established on 6 June 2025 by 8 national-level cooperative institutions, and officially launched on 5 February 2026.
It replaces the conventional "driver-partner" arrangement of app-based aggregators with a "Sarathi-owner" model: drivers can become owner-members of the cooperative, sit on its Board of Management, and share in its profits.
It runs on a zero-commission model with direct distribution of earnings to drivers, in line with the Ministry's motto "Sahkar se Samriddhi" (prosperity through cooperation).
As on 1 March 2026, it had 21.34 lakh registered users and 2.31 lakh registered Sarathis, operating in Delhi-NCR and four Gujarat cities, with a planned three-year expansion to Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns.

Background & context

Bharat Taxi is best understood as a product of the cooperative-sector push driven by the Ministry of Cooperation. That ministry is itself recent: it was carved out as a separate Union ministry in July 2021 (its work previously sat within the Ministry of Agriculture) precisely to give the cooperative movement a dedicated administrative home, with the stated aim of building a "cooperative-based economic development model" and deepening cooperatives to the grassroots. Its guiding slogan, repeated in this release, is Sahkar se Samriddhi — prosperity through cooperation. Bharat Taxi is one of several "national" cooperative bodies the ministry has promoted to take the cooperative form into new sectors of the economy.

The legal vehicle here is the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (MSCS) Act, 2002. A cooperative society whose objects and membership are confined to one State registers under that State's own cooperative law and is regulated by the State Registrar of Cooperative Societies. But once a society's area of operation spreads across more than one State, it must register under the MSCS Act, a Central law administered through the Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies in the Ministry of Cooperation. Because a ride-hailing platform is meant to operate across State lines — the release already lists cities in Delhi-NCR and Gujarat — the multi-State route is the natural one. The MSCS Act was amended by the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (Amendment) Act, 2023, which added provisions on governance, transparency, a Cooperative Election Authority and a Cooperative Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Development Fund; Bharat Taxi sits inside this post-amendment framework.

Bharat Taxi belongs to a wider family of new national multi-State cooperative societies set up under this ministry to organise scattered actors into member-owned enterprises. Its better-known siblings are the three national societies notified in 2023 — the National Cooperative Organics Limited (NCOL) for organic produce, the National Cooperative Exports Limited (NCEL) for exports, and the Bharatiya Beej Sahkari Samiti Limited (BBSSL) for seeds. Read alongside these, Bharat Taxi is the same idea applied to a new sector: instead of organic farmers, seed growers or exporters, it organises drivers into the owners of the platform they work on. The release also points to two companion answers given the same day on the operation (PRID 2241256) and expansion (PRID 2241258) of Bharat Taxi.

The deeper motivation is the structure of the app-based mobility market. In the conventional aggregator model, the platform is owned by a company and the driver is a "partner" who pays a per-ride commission, typically a sizeable share of the fare, and has no stake in or control over the platform. Driver grievances about commission rates, opaque fare-setting and lack of voice have been a recurring labour and consumer-affairs concern. Bharat Taxi's answer is to flip the ownership: the drivers collectively own the cooperative, so the surplus that would otherwise be commission flows back to them as members, and they have a vote in how it is run.

A cooperative, by its constitutional and legal definition, is a voluntary, member-owned and member-controlled association governed on the principle of "one member, one vote" rather than one share, one vote — a profit is distributed among members in proportion to their participation, not their capital. India recognises this form at the highest level: the 97th Constitutional Amendment, 2011 made forming cooperative societies a part of the right to form associations, added the promotion of cooperative societies to the Directive Principles (Article 43B), and inserted Part IXB on cooperatives. Bharat Taxi applies these settled principles to a digital marketplace — the Sarathis are the members, their rides are their participation, and the surplus returns to them. That is what is meant by calling the platform "cooperative-led" rather than simply state-run or company-run.

It is worth placing the structure against the scale of India's cooperative sector to see why the ministry treats it as a policy lever. India has one of the largest cooperative networks in the world — on the order of several lakh registered cooperative societies spanning credit, dairy, sugar, fertiliser, fisheries, housing and consumer activity — with the primary agricultural credit society (PACS) at the village base of the structure. The Ministry of Cooperation's recent agenda has been to modernise and computerise this base (including the computerisation of PACS) and to widen the range of activities a cooperative can undertake. Bharat Taxi is the urban, service-sector face of that same widening: taking the member-ownership idea that already works for milk and credit and applying it to mobility.

For Prelims

What it is: India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing (taxi-aggregation) platform — a member-owned alternative to company-owned cab apps.
Legal form: a multi-State cooperative society registered under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002 (Central law, Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies).
Nodal ministry: Ministry of Cooperation (created July 2021); aligned with its motto "Sahkar se Samriddhi".
Established: 6 June 2025, by 8 national-level cooperative institutions; officially launched 5 February 2026.
The members: drivers are called Sarathis; the model shifts from "driver-partner" to "Sarathi-owner" — drivers can become owners, sit on the Board of Management, and share profits.
Business model: zero-commission, with direct distribution of profits to driver-members; transparent fare structure; app with real-time tracking, multilingual interfaces and 24/7 support.
Women-focused feature: the "Sarthi Didi" feature for women.
Reach (as on 1 Mar 2026): 21.34 lakh registered users and 2.31 lakh registered Sarathis.
Where it runs: Delhi-NCR — Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad — and in Gujarat — Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Somnath and Dwarka.
Roadmap: phased expansion to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities over three years.
Sibling national cooperatives (same ministry, same MSCS route): NCOL (organics), NCEL (exports), BBSSL (seeds) — all set up in 2023.

For UPSC: Bharat Taxi = India's first cooperative-led, driver-owned ("Sarathi") ride-hailing platform; multi-State cooperative under the MSCS Act, 2002; zero-commission; under the Ministry of Cooperation; motto "Sahkar se Samriddhi".

What it is NOT: It is not a government department or a public-sector company — it is a member-owned cooperative society, and the State does not own its rides or profits. It is not registered under a State cooperative Act — because it operates across States it sits under the Central MSCS Act, 2002, not a single State's law. It is not a commission-based aggregator like the conventional company-owned cab apps — its defining feature is the zero-commission, driver-owner structure. And the Ministry of Cooperation, which runs it, is not the same as the Ministry of Agriculture, from which it was separated in 2021.

Why it matters

The release matters because it shows the cooperative form being extended from its traditional strongholds — dairy, credit, sugar, fertiliser, housing — into the platform economy, which until now has been built almost entirely on the company-owned aggregator model. The problem Bharat Taxi is built to address is concrete: gig drivers carry the costs and risks of the service yet capture little of the value and have no governance voice, while a per-ride commission erodes their take-home earnings. By making the drivers the owners, the cooperative tries to convert "partners" into stakeholders, keep the commission inside the driver community, and give that community a formal seat at the decision-making table.

It also matters as a test of the cooperative model's adaptability. Cooperatives have historically aggregated producers — milk pooled by dairy farmers under the Anand model is the textbook case. Bharat Taxi aggregates service providers in a digital marketplace, which is a newer application, and its success or failure feeds directly into the larger policy question of whether cooperatives can compete with venture-funded platforms on technology, reliability and scale. For the consumer-affairs and labour-rights debate around gig work, it offers a concrete Indian example of an ownership-based alternative rather than only a regulatory one.

For Mains

Exemplification

Cite Bharat Taxi as a live example of the cooperative form being deployed in the digital platform/gig economy — a driver-owned, zero-commission ride-hailing society — when illustrating new models of inclusive growth and the spread of cooperatives beyond agriculture.

Way-forward

Offer the "Sarathi-owner" cooperative as a way-forward for the gig-economy welfare debate: member ownership, profit-sharing and board representation as a structural answer to the lack of voice and the commission burden faced by platform workers.

Substantiation

Use the figures — 21.34 lakh users and 2.31 lakh Sarathis by 1 March 2026, operating across Delhi-NCR and four Gujarat cities — as evidence that a cooperative-owned platform can reach scale, when supporting an argument about cooperatives in the modern economy.

Position

Read it as the government's stated position — "Sahkar se Samriddhi" — that the cooperative-based model, channelled through the new Ministry of Cooperation and the MSCS Act framework, is a deliberate strand of its economic-development strategy.

Deploys into: inclusive growth and employment; cooperatives and the role of the new Ministry of Cooperation; the gig/platform economy and worker welfare; new economic-organisation models in service sectors.

Ministry of Cooperation · 2026-03-17 · PRID 2241251 · PIB source ↗

Related: cooperatives hub · Economy & Finance · this week's cards · companion replies on Bharat Taxi (PRID 2241256 operation · PRID 2241258 expansion)