The election of an Indian cooperator to the Global Board of the International Cooperative Alliance is not a ceremonial footnote. It is a signal that the grassroots grammar of Indian cooperation has become a language the world now wants to learn.
By Binod Anand | Panama City, 16 September 2026
At the Panama Convention Centre this week, the global cooperative movement chose the men and women who will steer it for the next four years. Among them is a name that carries the red soil of Saurashtra with it. IFFCO Chairman Dileep Sanghani has been elected an At-Large Director to the Global Board of the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) for the 2026–2030 term, chosen at the ICA’s General Assembly held in Panama on Tuesday, 15 September. He secured 526 votes and was the sole candidate fielded by India for the fifteen At-Large positions on the new board.
I write this not only as a columnist but as one of the many younger cooperators to whom Shri Sanghani has given his time, his counsel and his confidence. At the World Cooperative Economic Forum, he has made the mentorship of a new generation of cooperators a mission in itself — the rare senior leader who measures his legacy not by the institutions he has led, but by the leaders he has raised. That, for me, makes the news from Panama personal as much as national.
Our association runs deeper still. Both Shri Sanghani and I serve on the High-Power Committee on MSP and Agricultural Reforms — the body constituted following the Hon’ble Prime Minister’s intervention to ensure that farm policy is farmer-centric in intent, administratively impeccable in design, environmentally sustainable, economically viable, and broadly acceptable to the communities it is meant to serve. On that committee we work toward a single conviction: that the farmer’s true security lies in bargaining power, and that such power is built through collectives. Together we scan every government policy through a grassroots lens and carry field-tested reform into both the guidelines and their implementation — by all available means. Sanghani’s elevation to the ICA board therefore does not take a colleague away from that work; it gives it a global amplifier.
The Assembly in Panama was no small gathering. In all, 116 voters representing 193 members from 66 countries took part, during the ICA Global Conference week hosted by Panama. Dr Ariel Guarco of Argentina was returned unopposed as President, and fifteen At-Large Directors were elected from a field of some two dozen candidates — seven returning and eight new to the board. The week’s theme, “Building Bridges: Cooperative Contributions to a Peaceful World,” could hardly have been more fitting for a mandate that now carries an Indian voice to the movement’s high table.
For the Indian delegation, the result was met with chants of Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Vande Mataram on the floor. That emotion is earned. This is a proud moment in India’s cooperative journey — and, read correctly, it is more than a personal honour.
Why the world should watch Amreli
Sanghani did not arrive in Panama from a boardroom. He arrived from Amreli — the Gujarat district he represented as MLA and four-time Member of Parliament, and where his cooperative instincts were first tested against real fields and real farmers.
The single most instructive chapter is one most policymakers use without knowing its origin. In 1994, as Chairman of the Amreli District Central Cooperative Bank, Sanghani pioneered a farmer-credit model that was later adopted nationally as the Kisan Credit Card framework — turning an Amreli experiment into a defining chapter of India’s agricultural-credit story. A district-level idea, born of proximity to the borrower, became a national instrument that today underwrites tens of millions of farm households. That is the essence of what I would call the Amreli Model: solutions engineered at the last mile, then scaled to the nation.
The pattern repeats. He is credited with building Amar Dairy into a successful cooperative venture, its contribution to local employment publicly praised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Under his stewardship the Amreli District Central Cooperative Bank grew from 22 branches to 71, sharply widening farmers’ access to formal banking. He turned annual general meetings into a shared “AGM mela” so neighbouring societies could cut costs and spare members repeated travel, and he used that same reach to enrol lakhs of members into low-cost insurance. Credit, dairy, banking access, risk cover — each begun small, each made to scale.
This is precisely what the globe can learn. Much of the world’s cooperative conversation still oscillates between two poles: charity that does not scale, and corporates that do not share. The Amreli Model offers a third path — collective ownership that behaves with the discipline of an enterprise and the conscience of a community. It is the Gujarat cooperative laboratory in miniature, the same soil that produced Amul and a cooperative FMCG brand of over a lakh crore rupees in turnover.
A leader who rose through institutions, not around them
What makes Sanghani’s board seat significant is the rarity of his profile. A trained lawyer associated with the cooperative movement for more than four decades, he is a former President of the National Cooperative Union of India and was central to hosting the ICA Global Cooperative Conference and General Assembly in New Delhi in 2024, as well as the launch of the International Year of Cooperatives 2025. A four-time Member of Parliament and former Cooperation Minister in Gujarat, he has carried the vision of “Prosperity through Cooperation,” and as IFFCO Chairman leads a network of roughly 35,700 cooperatives representing more than 50 million farmers.
Few candidates anywhere combine grassroots cooperative practice, cooperative banking, dairy enterprise, elected public office and global engagement in a single career. That combination is exactly what a global board needs when the questions before it are no longer only about principles, but about delivery — for farmers, for women, for the young.
The mandate ahead
India is living through a deliberate cooperative decade: a dedicated Ministry of Cooperation, an expanding PACS-to-apex architecture, and a national ambition to make sahkar the connective tissue of the rural economy. A seat on the ICA Global Board gives that ambition a permanent microphone in the room where global cooperative priorities are set for the next four years — on agriculture, food security, rural finance, technology and cooperative entrepreneurship.
The deeper meaning is this. For much of the modern era, India imported development templates. In Panama, the direction of travel reversed. A model refined in an Indian district — proximity to the farmer, ownership by the community, scale without extraction — now sits at the movement’s global helm, ready to be studied rather than borrowed.
From Amreli’s cooperative bank to the ICA Global Board is a long road. That an Indian cooperator has walked it end to end is the proud news of the day. That the world may now walk parts of it in the other direction is the more lasting story.
BHARATonomics is a commentary series on India’s political economy and the rise of cooperative economics.
