A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce

**Snigdha Sharma** (0:00)
Amul is probably the closest thing that India has to a cooperative miracle.
Millions of small dairy farmers, mostly just owning a cow or two, pulled their milk and built a brand that now sits in our refrigerators across the country. No private boss is pocketing the profits. The farmers themselves own the business and the money flows back to them.
Now, hold that thought and picture a very different kind of a worker. The driver circling the airport for a fare, the woman who arrives to clean your home through an app. Millions of these gig workers in India are running the everyday machinery of urban life while owning almost none of it. When the platforms that they work for make money, that money head straight into the investor's pockets and the app. The workers are only allowed to keep whatever is left after the commission that they pay to the company. So imagine an Amul for them, a ride hailing service for example, that drivers themselves own where the profit returns to the people behind the wheel. And this is more or less the pitch behind Bharat Taxi. It is a cab hailing cooperative launched this February by none other than Amit Shah, India's Home Minister, who also runs a five-year-old ministry built entirely around cooperatives. Drivers are promised 80% of the profit, with just 20% kept back to run the business. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is a genuinely amazing idea. There is just one catch though. To share a profit, you have to earn one. And an Indian ride hailing, nobody ever has.
So, today we will look into the government's big bet on cooperatives for gig workers and why the promise sitting at the heart of it may take years to pay out. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will come to you with one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Tuesday, the 1st of September.
Let's begin with a promise itself. Zero commission, no surge pricing, and a share of the profits. It sounds like everything that drivers and riders have ever wanted. But, look closely and each piece gets shakier. Take the profit sharing part. It only begins once Bharat Taxi turns a profit. And nobody in India's ride hailing has managed that after a decade of trying. For example, in the last financial year alone, Uber lost Rs.1400 crore. Ola lost Rs.660 crores. Rapido, Rs.260 crore. Basically, just because they are choosing the cooperative route, that does not mean the arithmetic is going to change. And worst, 4 in 10 working cooperative societies in India already run at a loss. And Bharat Taxi is small. It runs about 11,000 rides a day. And if you spread that across the 800,000 drivers, that roughly works out to one ride for every 76 drivers on any given day.
One Delhi driver, Sushil, put it plainly to my colleague, The Ken reporter, Inderpal Singh.
On a good day, he gets two Bharat Taxi rides. Everything else still comes from Uber and Rapido. Now the zero commission pitch. The idea is not new. We've all heard about Namma Yatri based out of Bangalore that already tried this in 2022 And Uber and Rapido soon rolled out versions of their own. Namma Yatri earned 20 crore rupees last year and lost 51 And now coming to surge pricing. In fact, Bharat Taxi actually does raise fares when demand outstrips supply. It simply calls it a congestion charge. As one Bangalore ride-hailing founder told The Ken, that is just a fair climbing when cars are scarce under a gentler name. When The Ken checked its prices against Uber and Rapido across five Delhi routes, they landed at roughly the same level, sometimes even higher. Drivers meanwhile say that they earn less per kilometer on Bharat Taxi than on the private apps. The zero commission promise, in short, has left rides about as costly and driving about as thin as before.
The same wall is also waiting in home services where the government wants a cooperative too. The market leaders there, InstaHelp and Snabbit, are both losing money fast. InstaHelp's own boss says profitability is at least five years away. As one expert on cooperative banks put it to The Ken, in a market this competitive, a cooperative is simply one more player in an already crowded field. So if the economics are this punishing, why is the government pushing it so hard?
More on that in the next segment.
A part of the answer is faith in a model that has genuinely worked before. Let's go back to Amul for a moment. It succeeded for very specific reasons. Milk is a perishable. So the cooperative kept investing in predictable things like chillers to keep it fresh, plants to turn it into powder. The same logic scaled across Gujarat and then across the rest of the country. Vivek Bhandari, who once ran the Institute of Rural Management in Anand, has a line for it. He says, every product carries its own internal logic. And a taxi's logic looks nothing like milk's. Cars are expensive to buy and awkward to finance. A cooperative bank will not buy a fleet of them. It is, in short, a messy space.