The Campus That Serves the Nation
Picture a young woman from Tamil Nadu walking up the Aravalli ridge to study economics, decades ago, with little more than books and ambition. Picture a young man poring over maps of Asia in a JNU library, dreaming of the day India would speak to the world as an equal. Today that young woman, Nirmala Sitharaman, is India’s longest-serving Finance Minister, who in February 2026 presented her ninth consecutive Union Budget. That young man, S. Jaishankar, who earned his master’s, M.Phil. and doctorate at JNU, is the External Affairs Minister who carries Bharat’s voice to every capital of the world.
They are not alone. From the same red-brick hostels and dhabas have come Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee and generations of officers of the IAS and the Indian Foreign Service. Secretaries to the Government of India, ambassadors, editors, economists, strategists and scholars have shaped how India governs itself, defends its interests and understands its own place in history. When India negotiates at a global summit, frames a national budget or defends its sovereignty in a hostile world, there is very often a mind trained at JNU in the room. Whatever its critics say, this campus has given the nation some of its most loyal and capable servants.
Yet the India of 2047 will ask something more of JNU than administrators and critics, however brilliant. An Aatmanirbhar Bharat needs builders: young people who know how to create institutions with others, own them together and run them honestly. That is the missing chapter in JNU’s otherwise remarkable story, and the missing chapter in how India educates its brightest minds. It is called the Cooperative Economic Framework, and its spirit is as old as India’s villages: sahakar, cooperation. The time has come for a clarion call. Sahkar Se Samriddhi must begin on the campus, and the campus that has given India its Finance Minister and its External Affairs Minister should be the first to answer it.
Fifty-Seven Years on a Roller Coaster
JNU opened its doors in 1969 with a noble Nehruvian promise. It would be a national, residential university where young people from every state and every class would study the great questions of society, economy and the world together. The idealism was real, and so was the politics that followed. In the planning era of the 1970s, the Left became the campus’s dominant voice. When the Emergency suspended India’s liberties in 1975, JNU students were among those who were arrested and who resisted. In 1977, the students’ union president read out a memorandum to Indira Gandhi, after which she gave up the university’s chancellorship. A legend was born: JNU, the campus that challenges power.
But legends have a way of hardening into habits. In 1983, a dispute over admission policy spiralled into police action, mass arrests and a prolonged closure of the university. A practical question about who gets admitted had become a war of identities, and no institution stood between students and administration to settle it. That pattern would return again and again.
The 1990s brought new storms. The Mandal reforms put caste and social justice at the centre of campus life, and liberalisation made JNU India’s foremost workshop of critique against markets and globalisation. A nationalist current rose to challenge the old order, and in 2000 the ABVP won the union presidency for the first time. Marxists, Nehruvians, Ambedkarites, Gandhians, liberals and nationalists now crowded the same lawns and dhabas, each carrying a complete theory of the Indian economy.
Then came the years when the campus became a national battlefield. The February 2016 controversy over an event marking Afzal Guru’s execution led to sedition charges and turned JNU into a word that divided television studios across the country. The disappearance of student Najeeb Ahmed that October has never been resolved. A hostel fee hike in 2019 sparked months of protest, and on 5 January 2020 masked attackers stormed hostels in the night. In 2022, a quarrel over food in a hostel mess on Ram Navami became a communal clash. In November 2025, protest against facial recognition gates at the central library led to the rustication of the union’s leadership in February 2026. And so the cycle turned once more.
Read those episodes together and a striking truth emerges. The sparks are almost always ordinary: an admission rule, a fee, a mess menu, a library gate. What turns a spark into a fire is the absence of anything students and administration jointly own. JNU has been rich in ideas for fifty-seven years. It has been poor in shared practice.
The Road That Leads Nowhere
Radical thought, of any colour, makes a powerful offer to a young mind. It offers a complete explanation of the world, a clear enemy and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. For a twenty-year-old far from home, anxious about jobs and unsure of their place in a vast country, that offer can be intoxicating. Yet the road it opens almost always leads nowhere. It produces slogans rather than solutions, and anger rather than achievement. Too often it ends in lost semesters, broken careers and parents waiting for children who never quite return to the futures they were promised.
Why does that road attract so many? The deeper answer lies in an inheritance most Indians rarely examine: the colonial mindset. The colonial university was not built to make Indians owners of anything. It was built to produce clerks and administrators for a state that belonged to someone else. It taught young Indians to compete alone for scarce posts and to receive authority from above. It taught them to see institutions as alien structures that could be served, petitioned or resisted, but never built.
That habit survives long after the Empire left. Students experience their own university as a power standing over them, not a community they co-own. Campus debates are fought with frameworks largely imported from other societies, left and right alike, while India’s own rich experience of collective self-organisation stays out of the syllabus. Education is treated as a ticket to individual employment rather than preparation to create enterprises with others. Into the vacuum left by this sense of not-owning and not-belonging rush the ideologies that promise meaning through confrontation. In our time, hostile actors waging Fourth-Generation Warfare know exactly how to exploit that vacuum through disinformation and division.
You cannot cure this vacuum with lectures, bans or counter-slogans. Telling young people what to think only invites them to resist. What fills a vacuum of belonging is the lived experience of owning, deciding and building together. That is precisely what cooperation offers.
The World Already Knows the Answer
Here is a fact that should surprise anyone who thinks cooperatives are a relic of socialist planning. Some of the most successful campus cooperatives in the world thrive in the heartlands of capitalism, and have done so for well over a century.
In 1882, students and professors at Harvard grew tired of inflated prices in the shops around their campus and pooled their money to buy books and supplies cheaply. That was the birth of the Harvard Cooperative Society, “The Coop”, today the cooperative store of both Harvard and MIT. Fourteen years later, in 1896, faculty and students at the University of Texas at Austin founded the University Co-operative Society. It has supported student organisations for generations, with students sitting on its board. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, students at the University of California, Berkeley, leased a fraternity house and began what is now the Berkeley Student Cooperative, housing well over a thousand student members. In Canada, the Guelph Campus Co-op has served students continuously since 1913, and in Waterloo a student housing cooperative is home to more than a thousand residents. Across the United Kingdom, a new generation of student housing cooperatives, from Edinburgh to Birmingham, is spreading the idea afresh.
The most remarkable example comes from Japan, a market economy and an industrial giant. There, university cooperatives run the campus cafeterias, bookshops, stationery stores, travel services and much more. Their national federation reports that member students make up about 40 per cent of all university students in the country. Japan’s young people learn cooperation not from a textbook but from their daily lunch. Many go on to lead the co-ops they once used as students, as the current head of Japan’s national university co-op federation did, starting in his own university’s student committee in 1994.
India, too, has the seeds. Across Kerala, colleges have run student-and-staff cooperative societies for decades under the state’s Cooperative Societies Act of 1969, selling books, stationery and meals at fair prices, with students sitting on elected boards. The Nirmalagiri College Co-operative Society, registered in 1976, still states its aim of helping students learn cooperative management. Institutions such as the regional institutes of cooperative management have begun seminars on campus cooperatives for students. What India lacks is not the idea. It lacks a national mission that takes the idea from the canteen counter to the heart of university life.
From Battleground to Commons
Imagine JNU a few years from now. The hostel mess is no longer a source of grievance but an enterprise the students own. Members vote on menus and suppliers, read the audited accounts every quarter and elect their board on the principle of one member, one vote. The stationery store, the printing service, the campus café, the second-hand textbook exchange, even a student-run placement and internship desk, all belong to the same cooperative. A student from the Left and a student from the Right may still argue late into the night at a public meeting. The next morning, they sit together on the cooperative’s board and approve the same budget, because both want the mess to be good and the prices to be fair.
That is the heart of the proposed Campus Cooperative and Centre of Excellence at JNU, conceived by CNRI and the World Cooperative Economic Forum as the flagship of a National Mission for 500 Campus Cooperatives. It would not replace the students’ union or silence debate. JNU’s tradition of argument is a national asset. Instead, it would give that energy a second outlet, where disagreements are settled by votes, accounts and results rather than by confrontation. Participation would earn academic credit under NEP 2020, so that running a real enterprise becomes part of learning. A shared-services company would handle common procurement, audit and a digital platform, so that every campus cooperative stays member-owned and financially sound.
This is Sahkar Se Samriddhi in its most youthful form. The cooperative movement that turned Anand’s milk producers into a global force, and that the Ministry of Cooperation and the National Cooperation Policy are now carrying to every corner of the country, would at last reach the place where India’s future leaders are formed. A young person who has helped run a cooperative will never again see an institution as simply something done to them. They will know, from experience, that institutions are things people build.
Thinking Outside the Box
If the campus cooperative is to capture the imagination of a generation raised on smartphones, it must be bolder than a canteen counter. Several fresh ideas could make it so.
The first is a “Debate to Dividend” compact. Every student organisation on campus, whatever its ideology, would be invited to nominate members to a cooperative venture of its own choosing, a translation service, a campus repair start-up or a rural-produce outlet. The surplus of each venture would fund scholarships for the poorest students. Ideological rivals would then compete not over who shouts louder but over whose enterprise serves students better.
The second is a Sahkar Passport, a digital credential on the Academic Bank of Credits that records every hour a student spends in cooperative governance, from serving on a board to auditing accounts. Employers would value it as evidence of teamwork, financial literacy and integrity. Tribhuvan Sahkari University could certify it.
The third is a Campus-to-Village bridge. Each campus cooperative would partner with a farmer producer organisation or a dairy cooperative in a backward district, selling its produce on campus and sending student interns to help with accounts and digital marketing. The village would gain a market, and the student would gain a lesson in Bharat that no lecture can teach.
The fourth is alumni capital. JNU’s graduates sit in ministries, embassies, boardrooms and newsrooms across the world. A modest alumni share scheme, with every share carrying one vote regardless of its size, would let them invest in the campus cooperative. That would link generations of JNU students through ownership rather than nostalgia.
The fifth is a global twinning. The JNU cooperative could partner with a university co-op in Japan and a student cooperative in North America, exchanging student delegates each year. India’s young cooperators would see for themselves that cooperation is not a slogan of one ideology but a proven model of the world’s most advanced economies.
Tribhuvan Sahkari University: Integrating Minds, Decolonising Thought
India now possesses an institution built for exactly this mission. Tribhuvan Sahkari University was established through an Act of Parliament in 2025 on the campus of the Institute of Rural Management Anand. It carries the name of Tribhuvandas Patel, whose quiet work among the milk producers of Kheda helped give birth to Amul. It already teaches at campuses in Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar and Gadag. It is planned to grow to about 9,600 undergraduate and postgraduate seats, 16,000 diploma seats and nearly eight lakh certificate seats each year, with new schools and affiliated institutions across the country.
If Tribhuvan Sahkari University remains only a specialised school for the cooperative sector, it will do valuable work. If it becomes the intellectual partner of the Campus Cooperatives Mission, it can do transformative work. It could co-design the common curriculum on cooperative economics and governance used across five hundred campuses, and certify the student board members who run them. It could draw the JNU Centre of Excellence and other university centres into its national network. And it could build the evidence on how cooperation changes student well-being, employability and campus harmony.
Most of all, it can carry India’s own economic philosophy into the mainstream university, where it has long been absent. For generations, India’s brightest students have learnt their economics from frameworks shaped by the experiences of other societies. Very few learnt that their own country produced one of the world’s great experiments in collective enterprise. Restoring that knowledge, and letting students live it, is what decolonising the mind truly means. It means not rejecting the world’s ideas, but adding India’s own voice to them with confidence. A student who understands sahakar from the inside has an anchor. A mind with an anchor is far harder to drift into the extremes that lead nowhere.
The First Year: A Concrete Pilot at JNU
A vision becomes credible only when it has a calendar. The JNU pilot is designed to show results within twelve months, beginning with the services students use every day and expanding only as trust is earned.
The first quarter is for foundations. The JNU Academic Council and Executive Council would approve the Campus Cooperative and the Centre of Excellence in principle, and the university would allot space for a store and office. A promoter group of students from every school, together with faculty and CNRI and WCOOPEF advisers, would draft the bye-laws and apply for registration under the Delhi Cooperative Societies Act, 2003. In parallel, the Centre would design the credit-bearing course with Tribhuvan Sahkari University.
The second quarter is for membership and elections. An open enrolment drive would aim to bring in at least a thousand student members in its first round. An independent returning officer would then conduct the first board election. The board would appoint a professional manager on a fixed-term contract and open bank accounts with dual signatories.
The third quarter is for the first enterprises. The cooperative would open with three low-risk services: a stationery and printing store, a second-hand textbook exchange and a supply arrangement for hostel mess provisions in volunteer hostels. A student-run campus café would follow once the first audit is clean. The first cohort would also begin the credit course.
The fourth quarter is for scrutiny. The cooperative would close its first accounts, undergo statutory audit, hold its first annual general meeting and publish its first public report. Only then would the Centre recommend replication to other campuses. At each stage, responsibility is clear. The university provides space and academic approval, the elected board runs the business, the Centre provides training and research, and WCOOPEF’s shared-services company provides procurement and back-office support.
Who Pays, and Who Checks: The Financial Model
A cooperative that depends on grants is a project. A cooperative that pays its own way is an institution. The JNU model is built to stand on its own feet within three years, and the figures below are indicative, to be finalised in a detailed project report.
The start-up capital would come from three sources. The first is the members themselves. Each student would buy at least one share at a modest face value, around one hundred rupees, refundable when they graduate. With a thousand founding members, that alone raises the first lakh of rupees and, more importantly, gives every student a real stake. The second is a one-time seed grant or soft loan, of the order of twenty-five to fifty lakh rupees, from a cooperative institution, a CSR partner or the National Cooperative Development Corporation, to cover fit-out, initial stock and working capital. The third is in-kind support from the university, chiefly space and utilities, under a written agreement.
Operating costs would be kept lean. The largest items are a small professional staff, inventory and rent-free premises, with accounting, audit software and bulk purchasing shared across campuses through the WCOOPEF shared-services company. Because that company buys for many campuses at once, it can secure prices no single store could. The cooperative’s margins would be set low, enough to cover costs and build a modest reserve, not to make profits at students’ expense. Any surplus would be split three ways: a statutory reserve, a patronage rebate to members in proportion to their purchases, and a fund for scholarships for the poorest students.
Safeguards are what separate a trusted cooperative from a scandal. Every account would be held in the cooperative’s name with two signatories, one of them a student director. Accounts would face statutory audit by a qualified auditor every year, and an internal audit every quarter by a faculty-led committee. Members would see a social audit at the annual general meeting, where any member can question any expense. All procurement above a set value would go through open quotations published on the cooperative’s digital platform. Directors and their relatives would be barred from supplying goods or services to the cooperative.
A Student-Owned Democracy: Representation and Rights
The Campus Cooperative will succeed only if every student, of every background and every political view, feels it is truly theirs. Its rules of membership and voting must therefore be simple, fair and impossible to capture.
Membership would be open to every enrolled student of JNU, whatever their programme, year or affiliation, on purchase of a single share. Teaching and non-teaching staff could join as a separate class of members, but students would always hold the majority of seats on the board. No one could be refused membership on grounds of ideology, caste, religion, gender, region or political belief.
The board would be small enough to act and broad enough to represent. An indicative structure is nine directors. Six would be students elected by student members, one a faculty member elected by staff members, one a university nominee, and one an independent professional director with expertise in finance or cooperation. In line with the constitutional provisions on cooperative boards, seats would be reserved for women and for members of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Directors would serve staggered terms so that experience is never lost when a batch graduates.
Every member would have exactly one vote, regardless of how many shares they hold or how much they spend. Elections would be run by an independent returning officer, with spending limits and a code of conduct modelled on the Lyngdoh Committee norms. The cooperative’s bye-laws would bar its use for any party-political campaign. Students may bring their convictions to the general body, but not their party machinery to the board.
Grievances deserve a better path than the protest site. Any member could file a complaint, online or in writing, with a member-grievance committee that must acknowledge it within two days and respond within fifteen working days. A member dissatisfied with the answer could appeal to the general body, and ultimately to the Registrar of Cooperative Societies under the Act. Every complaint and its outcome, without personal details, would be published in the annual report.
From One Campus to Five Hundred: The National Rollout
Five hundred campus cooperatives cannot be created by decree. They must be grown in phases, with each phase earning the right to the next.
The first phase is JNU alone, for one year, as described above. The second phase, over the following two years, would extend the model to around twenty-five campuses chosen to test it in very different settings. These would include central and state universities, a women’s university, an institution in the North-East, an engineering or agricultural university, and colleges in aspirational districts. The third phase, from the fourth year onward, would scale up towards five hundred campuses through Tribhuvan Sahkari University’s affiliation network and state cooperative departments.
Selection must be transparent and published in advance, so that no campus is chosen for political convenience. An indicative set of criteria would include a formal resolution of the institution’s academic and executive bodies, and evidence of student demand, such as a minimum number of pre-registered members. It would also weigh readiness of space and basic governance, regional and social diversity across the cohort, and priority for institutions serving first-generation and rural students. Applications and scores would be published on the Mission’s website.
Evaluation must be independent of the people running the programme. Tribhuvan Sahkari University, working with a third-party evaluator, would compare participating campuses with similar campuses that have not yet joined. It would measure prices, student participation, enterprise survival and learning outcomes. The results, positive or negative, would be made public before each new phase is approved. If the evidence shows the model is not working in a particular type of institution, the Mission would adapt it there rather than impose it.
Measured, Published, Accountable
A movement that asks students to trust it must first be willing to be judged. Every campus cooperative, and the Mission as a whole, would publish an annual public report built around four simple questions.
The first question is affordability: are students paying less? Each cooperative would compare the prices of a standard basket of goods and services, such as stationery, printing, textbooks and a mess meal, with prices in the nearest market, and publish the difference. The second is participation: is the cooperative genuinely democratic? It would report the share of students who are members, turnout in board elections, and the representation of women, first-generation learners and students from reserved categories among members and directors.
The third question is enterprise survival: is the cooperative a sound business? The report would show revenue, costs, surplus or loss, reserves and audit findings for each enterprise, and how many of the Mission’s cooperatives remain in operation after three and five years. The fourth is learning: are students actually gaining skills? It would count the students who earned credits through the cooperative course, those certified by Tribhuvan Sahkari University, and those who went on to found or work in cooperatives and other enterprises.
The report would also list every grievance received and its outcome, and every audit objection and how it was resolved. A cooperative that falls short on these measures for two consecutive years would receive support and, if necessary, restructuring from the Centre, rather than being quietly kept alive on subsidies. All reports would be consolidated into a national Campus Cooperatives Report, placed before the Ministry of Cooperation and released to the public, so that policymakers, journalists and students alike can see what is working and what is not.
A Clarion Call
Swami Vivekananda asked for education that makes human beings and builds nations. He did not ask for education that produces clerks for others, or rebels without a destination. The young women and men who argue late into the night on JNU’s ridge are not India’s adversaries. They are India’s children, full of conviction and energy, searching for a cause worth their lives. The tragedy is not that they care too much. The tragedy is that the nation has offered them too few ways to turn conviction into creation.
Sahkar Se Samriddhi offers that way. It says to every young Indian: do not only argue about how the country should be run, come and run something together. Own it, govern it, audit it, grow it, and share what it earns. Let JNU, the campus that has argued about India for fifty-seven years, become the first campus to build India cooperatively. Then let five hundred campuses follow.
The debate has been magnificent. It is time for it to pay a dividend, to the students, to their families, and to the Viksit Bharat they will inherit in 2047.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are campus cooperatives?
Campus cooperatives are member-owned enterprises that students, staff or other eligible members can establish to provide services and manage shared economic activities democratically.
What is the proposed campus cooperative initiative at JNU?
The article proposes a Campus Cooperative and Centre of Excellence at Jawaharlal Nehru University to give students practical experience in cooperative governance, enterprise management and collective ownership.
What is the proposed National Mission for 500 Campus Cooperatives?
It is a proposed national expansion model intended to help universities establish student-centred cooperatives, subject to feasibility, institutional participation and appropriate approvals.
How could Tribhuvan Sahkari University contribute?
The article proposes that the university could support cooperative education, curriculum development, governance training and evaluation of campus cooperative initiatives.
How could campus cooperatives benefit rural communities?
The proposed campus-to-village model would connect university cooperatives with farmer producer organisations and other rural producer groups through market access, internships and digital services.
