Most financial sectors have a regulator. India's interest-free cooperative sector, which exists precisely because the regulator's framework has no room for it, has something different: a promoter. Sahulat Microfinance Society, a New Delhi NGO registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and established in 2010, is the closest thing India has to an industry body for interest-free finance. It takes no deposits and makes no loans. What it does instead, mapping, incubating and standard-setting for the cooperative societies that do, is the reason the sector is legible at all. Facts verified against sahulat.org on August 6, 2026.
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The problem Sahulat was built to solve
India licenses no Islamic banks, so qard-based finance at scale has exactly one legal vehicle: the credit cooperative society, registered under a state cooperative act or the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Act 2002. That structure is workable but fragmenting. Each society is a separate legal entity under its own registrar, with its own bylaws, its own governance and its own website, if it has a website at all. Before Sahulat, nothing connected them: no shared standards, no sector data, no way for a family in Aurangabad or Aligarh to find out whether an interest-free society operated nearby. Sahulat was established in 2010 to be that connective tissue, incubating new societies and binding existing ones into a network.
The network in numbers
The published scale, as of March 31, 2025, per Sahulat's own pages: 14 states, 122 branches, more than 400,000 beneficiaries, INR 641 crore in cumulative loans disbursed, INR 49.29 crore in share capital and INR 388 crore in deposit balances. Its who-we-are page counts 51 affiliated legal entities operating 101 branches; the gap between the two branch counts likely reflects different snapshot dates. An honest caveat belongs next to all of these figures: they are self-reported by affiliates and not independently audited at network level. They are also the only sector-wide numbers that exist, which is exactly the point about Sahulat's role.
The affiliates include the sector's most substantial institutions. Al-Khair, the network's most documented northern society, operates across Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Bait-Un-Nas'r in Mumbai predates Sahulat by 34 years, proof the model outlasts trends. Janseva carries the widest permitted footprint at twelve states.
The Memorandum of Co-operation: standards without a regulator
Affiliation is contractual. Each society signs a Memorandum of Co-operation under which Sahulat ensures adherence to cooperative principles, application of interest-free principles, financial prudence, professional governance and social performance indicators. In a sector with no Shariah boards anywhere, and that absence is structural, not one society in the network publishes one, the MoC is the only standard-setting mechanism that exists. It is a civil-law instrument, not scholar certification, and members should understand the difference. It is also considerably more than nothing, which is what the sector had before.
Sahulat's published corpus does the rest of the standard-setting work: model bylaws for new societies, the texts of state cooperative acts and the MSCS Act, GST advisories, and the RBI circular barring cooperatives from using the word bank, republished with a compliance advisory to affiliates. A community group wanting to start an interest-free society in its own city will find something close to a published startup kit.
The research output nobody else produces
Sahulat is also the sector's only research house. It has published annual reports from FY 2017-18 through FY 2023-24, two sector-wide IFCCS reports in 2019 and 2021, and the Sahulat Journal. For researchers, journalists or anyone doing due diligence on Indian interest-free finance, this corpus is primary-source material available nowhere else. The network's work has drawn international recognition from Islamic microfinance bodies: the Best Islamic Microfinance Society Award at GIMFC Istanbul in 2017, IFFSA Gold at Colombo in 2018, and Best Microfinance Project of the Year at IFFSA Maldives in 2019.
What Sahulat cannot do for you
The honest limits, stated as plainly as the strengths. Sahulat is not a consumer protection body: it cannot compensate members if an affiliate fails, and nothing in the network carries DICGC deposit insurance, a fact treated fully in are cooperative society deposits safe. It is not a Shariah certifier: interest-free standards rest on the MoC, and the service-charge models its affiliates use remain genuinely fiqh-debated, a debate covered in is a service charge riba. And its website is dated in places, with some subpages failing to load, a small irony for the sector's documentation hub.
How to actually use the network
For a consumer, Sahulat is the map, not the destination. Use the affiliate directory on sahulat.org to find whether an interest-free society operates in your state; it names societies from Bihar to Maharashtra and Telangana. Treat appearance in the directory as a first filter, not a verdict. Then verify the individual society directly: its registration number, its permitted states, its published product rules, and its service-charge schedule in writing. Our guides to the three verified societies, Al-Khair, Bait-Un-Nas'r and Janseva, show what that verification looks like in practice.
Reading the network's numbers like an analyst
A few observations for anyone using Sahulat's statistics seriously. The INR 641 crore figure is cumulative disbursement since inception, not an outstanding loan book, so it measures historical throughput rather than current scale; the INR 388 crore deposit balance is the better snapshot of the network's present size. The ratio between deposits and the INR 49.29 crore of share capital sketches the sector's funding model: roughly eight rupees of member deposits for every rupee of member equity, which is why deposit confidence is the network's lifeblood and why the governance standards in the MoC matter more than their civil-law form suggests. And the per-branch arithmetic, INR 388 crore across 122 branches, averages a little over INR 3 crore of deposits per branch: genuinely small institutions, which is both the sector's fragility and its intimacy. These are member-scale societies where the branch manager knows the depositors, not anonymous balance sheets.
The distribution across 14 states also tells a story: the network is thickest where the promoter societies began, Bihar and Maharashtra, and thin across the south and east, so the practical availability of interest-free finance in India remains a postcode question. The affiliate directory, not the headline state count, answers whether the sector exists for you.
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What should a reader do with the network's existence? Practically, use it as a verification layer. A society that belongs to the Sahulat federation has chosen to operate inside a promoter's model bye-laws, training and audit culture, which is more scrutiny than a standalone society faces. That is not a guarantee, and Sahulat is a promoter body, not a regulator with enforcement powers or an insurance fund. But when you are choosing between an affiliated society and an unaffiliated one you cannot otherwise verify, the affiliation is real information. Check the affiliation claim on the society's own materials and on the network's published lists rather than taking a branch manager's word for it.
The larger story is worth sitting with. In a country whose banking law cannot accommodate interest-free finance, a New Delhi NGO spent fifteen years quietly building what the formal system would not: a network of several hundred thousand people saving and borrowing without riba, with published standards, published data and published law. It is infrastructure built from the community side, and whatever the sector's limits, that is an achievement with few parallels anywhere. The full sector explainer is at interest-free credit societies explained.