PIB Tracker10 lakh Saarthis, 20,000 rides a day - one ride each every 50 days
Bharat Taxi runs on "Driver is the Owner". Six months in, the cooperative has signed up a million drivers and credited them Rs 100 crore - about Rs 1,000 each.
What happened
- Bharat Taxi launched formally in Lucknow, with Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Kanpur and Prayagraj the same day.
- MoS Cooperation Murlidhar Mohol addressed the launch with UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
- MoUs exchanged with the Airport Authority, Lucknow Metro Rail and Lucknow Police.
- Adityanath launched the Mukhyamantri Krishak Samriddhi Yojana portal, Urvarak Setu app and UPCDC app.
- Uttar Pradesh has enrolled around 54 lakh new cooperative members through its PACS membership campaign.
For Prelims
- Bharat Taxi: a cooperative ride-hailing service on the principle "Driver is the Owner". Its drivers are called Saarthis.
- Ministry of Cooperation: created in July 2021 - previously cooperation was handled within the Ministry of Agriculture. Sahkar Se Samriddhi is its framing slogan.
- The cooperative base: around 8.5 lakh societies, nearly 32 crore members, across about 30 sectors.
- PACS: Primary Agricultural Credit Societies - the village-level base of the three-tier cooperative credit structure. Around 80,000 are being computerised at about Rs 3,000 crore.
- Cooperatives in the Constitution: the 97th Amendment made forming cooperative societies a fundamental right under Article 19(1)(c) and added Part IXB.
- Why mobility: cooperation is listed as expanding into agriculture, organic products, seeds, exports, storage, healthcare and now mobility.
- The activity figures: 10 lakh Saarthis, 20,000 rides a day, Rs 100 crore credited in six months.
- The derived numbers: about one ride per Saarthi every 50 days; about Rs 1,000 earned per Saarthi over six months; about Rs 275 a ride.
For UPSC: The first serious attempt to put the gig economy inside a cooperative structure, which is a genuinely new answer to a question the syllabus keeps asking. Use it on cooperatives and Sahkar Se Samriddhi, on gig and platform workers where ownership rather than regulation is the proposed remedy, and on scheme evaluation, where registration and activity are different measures.
What it is NOT: The release gives no city-wise ride or driver split, so whether 20,000 daily rides are spread across all launch cities or concentrated in one is unknown. It gives no figure for how many of the 10 lakh Saarthis are actually active in any week, which is the number that would make the earnings meaningful. There is no commission rate, no fare structure and no statement of what share of a fare the Saarthi keeps - the central question for a driver-ownership claim. No capital structure, funding source or governance arrangement for the cooperative is described. And no comparison is offered with commercial aggregators on price, wait time or driver earnings, so the model is asserted rather than tested.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS2.11 · GS3.2 · Linkage L2
Anchor
Bharat Taxi has signed up more than 10 lakh drivers in six months and is completing around 20,000 rides a day. Those two numbers divide into one ride per registered Saarthi every fifty days, and Rs 100 crore credited across a million drivers is about Rs 1,000 each.
Substantiation (data)
The per-ride economics look ordinary - roughly Rs 275 a ride on the stated figures - which suggests the fares are real and the problem is volume, not price. Registration has run far ahead of demand: a million drivers joined a platform that currently generates enough work for a few thousand of them on any given day.
Position
The idea deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. "Driver is the Owner" attacks the structural complaint about ride-hailing - that the surplus accrues to a platform the drivers do not own - by changing who owns it rather than by regulating what it charges. The MoUs with the Airport Authority, Lucknow Metro Rail and Lucknow Police are the demand side of that bet.
Counterpoint
Ownership does not create rides. A cooperative faces the same two-sided market problem as any platform: riders go where cars are, cars go where riders are, and a million idle drivers is not an advantage. At fifty days between rides, the ownership stake is worth very little to the median Saarthi today.
Problematisation
The release omits everything needed to judge it. No active-driver count, no city split, no commission rate and no statement of what share of a fare the Saarthi actually keeps. For a model whose entire claim is about who captures the surplus, the absence of the revenue split is the significant silence.
Conclusion
Watch rides per active driver, not total registrations. The cooperative answer to platform labour is a real idea and this is its first large test; on today's figures it has solved recruitment and not yet solved demand.
Deploys into: Cooperatives and Sahkar Se Samriddhi · Gig and platform workers · Two-sided markets and platform economics · Scheme evaluation: registration versus activity
Ministry of Cooperation · 2026-09-23 · PRID 2314086 · PIB source ↗