Al-Khair Co-operative Credit Society does something almost nothing else in India's interest-free sector does: it prints its numbers. Membership costs, deposit minimums, loan tenors, service charges and eligibility gates are all published on alkhairsociety.com, which means a prospective member can make an informed decision rather than a trusting one. This guide walks through the whole institution, products, pricing, process and the caveats that deserve equal prominence, using the society's own pages as crawled and verified on August 6, 2026.
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What Al-Khair is
Al-Khair was established in 2002 by around 20 founders, opening its first office at Haroon Nagar, Phulwari Sharif, Patna on August 18, 2002. It is registered under the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Act 2002, registration number MSCS/CR/136/2002, printed in its site header along with its four permitted states: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Since the creation of the Ministry of Cooperation, multi-state societies fall under its supervision. The society claims 13 branches across the four states and lists 11 with addresses and phone numbers: six in Bihar, two in Jharkhand, two in Lucknow and one in Jamia Nagar, Delhi.
Its stated mission frames everything else: a completely interest-free institution serving slum dwellers and micro-entrepreneurs who otherwise depend on moneylenders charging 60 to 120 percent a year, a comparison we examine in co-ops versus moneylenders. It is an affiliate of the Sahulat network, the sector's national promoter.
Joining: what membership costs
All products are members-only, and the membership mechanics are published in full. Joining requires shares of INR 10 each, minimum ten shares, so INR 100, plus an admission fee of INR 50 and a donation of INR 50. Total entry cost: INR 200. One term deserves attention before you pay it: per the society's Daily Deposit page, shares are non-transferable and non-refundable for three years. That is a real lock-in on your share capital, and you should treat it as the price of admission rather than a deposit you can recall.
The deposit shelf
No Al-Khair deposit pays interest; the site states this categorically. The Amanat account is the liquid one: minimum balance INR 100, deposit and withdraw anytime during working hours, with loan disbursements normally credited here. A separate Saving Account page describes a variant with a INR 5,000 minimum and INR 10,000 maximum per account, and the inconsistency between the two pages' figures is one the society should fix; take the current numbers from your branch in writing. The Daily Deposit account is the signature product: opened from INR 50, with an authorised collector gathering savings daily or weekly at your shop or home, recording each collection on a signed card you keep. Withdrawals open only after the following calendar month, at the branch, with the passbook. Around these sit Sahyog six-month deposits for philanthropists who want to fund the lending pool, earmarked guarantee funds held against a specific member's loan, and a Haj account for pilgrimage savings.
Read the design honestly: the Daily Deposit's value is discipline and loan eligibility, not liquidity, and its one-month withdrawal lag is a real constraint. The doorstep collection matches how daily earners actually hold money, which is why it works.
The loan shelf, with printed prices
Loans are priced by one-time service charges plus GST, explicitly instead of interest, under board lending rules approved December 31, 2011. The short-term business loan runs 3 months at 8 percent of the loan amount, one-time. The mid-term business loan runs 8 to 12 months at 16 to 18 percent depending on amount and duration. The demand loan, for personal and household needs over 8 months, does not print its charge on the page, the shelf's one disclosure gap; by sibling pricing, expect a one-time percentage. The charges do not accrue with time, and no late-payment escalation is published; network beneficiary accounts describe extensions granted during COVID at no extra cost.
Eligibility is earned, and the gates are printed. You need a registered membership, an account at least 3 months old with regular deposits, an account balance at 10 percent of the loan you want, shares worth another 10 percent, guarantors (one member plus one family member below INR 1 lakh; two members plus one family member at or above it), one security item from a published list (bank cheque, gold, original property or vehicle document), and a INR 20 application form. A Local Advisory Committee may approve mutually agreed terms within society norms. Practical translation: a member self-funds roughly a fifth of the loan through balance and shares, and the process rewards those who built the deposit history before the emergency.
The honest caveats
Four things belong in any fair account of Al-Khair. First, deposits carry no DICGC insurance: this is a cooperative society, not an RBI-licensed bank, and if it failed no insurance would step in. Read are cooperative society deposits safe before depositing meaningful sums. Second, there is no Shariah board; the interest-free discipline is structural, under the 2011 board rules, not scholar-certified. Third, the loan economics deserve arithmetic: 8 percent for 3 months annualises to roughly 32 percent if rolled repeatedly, and the mid-term band annualises to roughly 16 to 27 percent, expensive against bank credit and transformative against the moneylender baseline, as computed in the true cost of interest-free loans. Fourth, charges that scale with loan size and tenor are the sector's hardest fiqh question, unresolved for Al-Khair as for everyone else, and covered in is a service charge riba.
Who Al-Khair fits
The natural member is a daily earner, shopkeeper or micro-entrepreneur in Patna, Bihar's towns, Jharkhand, Lucknow or Jamia Nagar who wants doorstep savings collection and a route to non-compounding credit. The natural saver is someone who values riba-free safekeeping over yield and insurance, at exposure levels their household could survive losing. If that is you, the practical sequence is: join for INR 200, run the Daily Deposit or Amanat account for three months minimum, keep balance and shares at a tenth of any loan you foresee, and get the current charge schedule from your branch in writing. For how Al-Khair compares against its Mumbai peers, see Al-Khair vs Bait-Un-Nas'r vs Janseva.
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How does Al-Khair compare with simply keeping money at home or in a bank savings account? Against cash at home, the society offers documentation, discipline and a path to loan eligibility, at the cost of counterparty risk. Against the savings account, it offers freedom from interest and from the purification chore, at the cost of DICGC protection. Neither trade is obviously right for all of a household's money, which is why the sensible pattern in this sector is allocation, not all-or-nothing: transactional money in the banking system, a working balance at the society sized to what the household could survive losing, and long-term wealth in screened investments.
Two closing notes on using the society well. The special-purpose deposits are underused and worth knowing: the Sahyog six-month deposit exists for better-off community members who want their idle money funding interest-free loans rather than sitting in a bank, philanthropy through liquidity rather than donation, and the earmarked guarantee fund lets a relative's deposit stand as security for your loan, formalising the family backing that informal borrowing has always used. And keep your own paper: the signed collection card, the passbook entries, the loan agreement with its charge stated. Al-Khair's disclosure culture is genuine but the site has inconsistencies between pages, and in a members-only institution your documents are your protection. The sector context, including why no deposit here is insured, is in interest-free credit societies explained.