ABSTRACT
The ideology of cooperation tends to stress that people should work together in order to better themselves and their communities. The cooperatives in Maharashtra have done more than reduce the antagonism between themselves and their cane suppliers: they have established a harvest and transport system that contributes greatly to efficiency. Cooperative factories on the Maharashtrian pattern may not represent the only solution to the problems of the sugar industry, but they seem to represent the best solution discovered so far. In India, any large-scale comparison between cooperative and private sugar factories becomes essentially a comparison between regions. The average technical efficiency of the cooperatives in Maharashtra is higher than that of the northern private factories, in part due to locational advantages, but primarily due to better organization. A number of cooperative factories have run at a loss, but a higher proportion of northern private factories have done the same.
