Throughout the world, co-operatives have been established by national governments, international agencies, and sometimes even by local initiative, to further the goals of rural development. Co-operatives are expected to mobilise scarce resources for economic growth and also to incorporate the rural poor in the development process, so as to equalise the benefits obtained from growth. However, the performance of co-operatives in moct countries has been spotty and mostly discouraging. Among the many reasons for these poor results, it has been noted that governments have a tendency to impose rigid, bureaucratic frameworks which stifle initiative and adaptive responses to local conditions (see Hyden 1983;Hopkins 1983), and sometimes even to actively oppose locally organised co-operatives due to fear of political opposition from below (Vincent 1983;Almy 1983). India's parliamentary democracy usually does not run to this extreme, offering instead a more pluralistic framework within which some kinds of co-operatives have been very successful, though many have been disappointing.Co-operatives in India are transplants from the West where they originated during the middle of the last century. They were formally introduced in India in 1904 with the promulgation of the Indian Co-operative Societies Act. To a considerable extent the Act was the outcome of deliberations among government officials and leaders of public opinion who were interested in protecting peasant cultivators from the exploitative activities of money-lenders and traders. In the beginning, co-operatives confined their activities to providing cheap credit to farmers. Gradually, and particularly after independence, co-operative activity was extended to other spheres such as banking, processing and marketing. Co-operation soon became one of the instruments of rural development. Successive Five Year Plans have

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