Bharat Taxi: India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform

A driver-owned cooperative cab service launched under the "Sahkar se Samriddhi" vision, where the drivers themselves are the members and owners.

What happened

• The Ministry of Cooperation confirmed the launch and operational framework of Bharat Taxi, described as India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing platform.
• The platform places drivers — branded "Sarathis" — at the centre of ownership and governance, so the people driving the cabs are the cooperative's members rather than gig workers for an outside firm.
• It is registered under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002, was established on 6 June 2025 by eight national-level cooperative institutions, and was formally launched on 5 February 2026.
• Bharat Taxi runs a zero-commission, subscription-based model: instead of taking a percentage cut from each ride, it charges drivers a flat subscription, leaving the fare with the driver.
• As of 23 March 2026, about 4.31 lakh driver-partners had been onboarded.
• Services are live in Delhi-NCR and Gujarat cities (Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat), with onboarding under way in Chandigarh and Lucknow and phased expansion planned to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

Background & context

Bharat Taxi sits inside a deliberate policy push to build cooperative enterprises in sectors long dominated by private aggregators. The guiding slogan is "Sahkar se Samriddhi" — "Prosperity through Cooperation" — the stated vision of the Ministry of Cooperation, a Union ministry carved out as a separate department in July 2021 to give the cooperative movement a dedicated administrative home. Before this, cooperative matters were handled within the Ministry of Agriculture. The new ministry's mandate is to strengthen, modernise and professionalise cooperative societies and to extend the cooperative model into newer economic activities — and a driver-owned ride-hailing service is exactly that kind of new-sector experiment.

The legal vehicle for Bharat Taxi is the Multi-State Cooperative Societies (MSCS) Act, 2002. This is the law used when a cooperative society operates across more than one State, because an ordinary cooperative registered under a single State's cooperative law is confined to that State. By registering under the MSCS Act, Bharat Taxi can lawfully operate and enrol driver-members across Delhi-NCR, Gujarat, Chandigarh, Lucknow and beyond as a single multi-State body, supervised by the Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies who sits under the Ministry of Cooperation. The same MSCS framework underlies the ministry's other recent national cooperatives — for organic produce, seeds and exports — so Bharat Taxi belongs to a recognisable family of new multi-State societies, not a one-off.

The model deliberately contrasts with the commercial app-based aggregator. A conventional ride-hailing app is owned by investors, the driver is a service provider on the platform, and the platform earns by taking a commission (often a substantial percentage) out of every fare. Bharat Taxi inverts the ownership: the drivers collectively own the cooperative, decisions are taken on cooperative principles (one-member-one-vote rather than shareholding weight), and the surplus is meant to flow back to the driver-members. The "zero-commission, subscription" design follows directly from that ownership logic — there is no external owner whose return depends on skimming each ride, so the platform sustains itself through a flat membership-style subscription instead.

A useful way to fix Bharat Taxi in memory is to compare it with a familiar cooperative success — the dairy model behind AMUL. There, lakhs of small milk producers own the cooperative federation, pool their output, and capture the value that would otherwise accrue to private middlemen; the producer is also the owner. Bharat Taxi applies the identical logic to a service rather than a farm commodity: the "producer" of the ride — the driver — is the owner, and the cooperative captures the margin a private aggregator would have taken. The difference is the sector and the era: dairy cooperatives organised a physical supply chain in the twentieth century, while Bharat Taxi organises a digital, app-mediated service in the platform economy. Reading it as "AMUL for cabs" captures both the continuity and the novelty.

The eight national-level cooperative institutions that promoted Bharat Taxi reflect the Ministry of Cooperation's method of using the established apex bodies of the cooperative movement as sponsors, so that a new society launches with institutional backing, capital and credibility rather than starting from zero. The same sponsorship pattern recurs across the ministry's recent national societies, which is why the new cooperatives — for organics, seeds, exports and now mobility — share a common institutional parentage and a common legal form under the MSCS Act. For Bharat Taxi specifically, the design choices that flow from cooperative ownership are visible in its named features: the driver-members styled as "Sarathis", the zero-commission charging, the subscription that replaces the per-ride cut, and a phased rollout that begins in metro and large-city clusters before reaching Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns.

For Prelims

• What it is: India's first cooperative-led ride-hailing (cab-aggregation) platform.
• Legal status: a multi-State cooperative society registered under the Multi-State Cooperative Societies Act, 2002.
• Established: 6 June 2025 · Launched: 5 February 2026.
• Promoters: eight national-level cooperative institutions.
• Owner-members: the drivers themselves, branded "Sarathis" — members and owners, not employees or gig contractors.
• Business model: zero-commission, subscription-based — the platform takes no per-ride commission; drivers pay a subscription.
• Scale: ~4.31 lakh driver-partners onboarded as of 23 March 2026.
• Footprint: live in Delhi-NCR and Gujarat (Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Surat); onboarding in Chandigarh and Lucknow; phased expansion to Tier-2/3 cities.
• Nodal ministry: Ministry of Cooperation (a separate Union ministry since July 2021).
• Guiding vision: "Sahkar se Samriddhi" (Prosperity through Cooperation).
• Supervising authority: the Central Registrar of Cooperative Societies, under the Ministry of Cooperation.

What it is NOT: Bharat Taxi is not a privately-owned aggregator app and not a government-run taxi company; ownership rests with the driver-members through the cooperative. It is not the same entity as "Sahakar Taxi" references seen in some cooperative-sector replies of the same day — those are part of the broader cooperative-mobility push and should not be conflated with the registered Bharat Taxi society. It is also not registered under a single State's cooperative law; the multi-State character is the whole point, which is why it uses the MSCS Act, 2002 rather than a State Cooperative Societies Act. And it is not commission-based — the defining feature is that it charges no commission on fares.

The cooperative-enterprise set it belongs to. Under the Ministry of Cooperation, Bharat Taxi sits alongside three flagship national multi-State cooperative societies promoted to take cooperatives into new economic spaces: the National Cooperative Organics Limited (NCOL), which markets organic produce under the "Bharat Organics" brand; the Bharatiya Beej Sahakari Samiti Limited (BBSSL), the national seed cooperative; and the National Cooperative Exports Limited (NCEL), the apex society for cooperative exports. Long-established cooperative giants such as IFFCO and KRIBHCO (fertiliser cooperatives) and AMUL (dairy, via the GCMMF federation) are the older anchors of the same movement. Knowing this grouping is what lets you survive a "how many of the following are multi-State cooperative initiatives" or a "match the cooperative body to its sector" question.

Why it matters

The problem Bharat Taxi addresses is the squeeze on app-cab and auto drivers. In the commercial aggregator model, the platform's commission, surge logic and pricing are controlled by an investor-owned firm, and drivers — who carry the cost of the vehicle, fuel and time — have little say over the terms and surrender a slice of every fare. A driver-owned cooperative is the institutional answer the Ministry of Cooperation is testing: put governance and surplus in the hands of the drivers, remove the per-ride commission, and let a flat subscription cover the platform's running costs. If it holds up at scale, it offers a template for cooperatives to enter other platform-economy services where a small number of private aggregators currently set the terms.

It also matters as a test of the wider "Sahkar se Samriddhi" thesis — that the cooperative form, India's traditional instrument for pooling small producers (dairy, fertiliser, credit), can be modernised and pushed into 21st-century services like digital mobility. The scale already reported, roughly 4.31 lakh driver-partners within weeks of launch, signals that the demand among drivers for a fairer ownership structure is real. The open questions the model still has to answer — technology, customer experience, ride availability and financial sustainability against deep-pocketed private rivals — are precisely the kind of "challenges/way-forward" material a Mains answer can deploy.

For Mains