Sahulat Microfinance Society Review - Halal Finance Products

Sahulat Microfinance Society was established in 2010 in New Delhi under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, to solve a structural problem: India's banking law makes no room for interest-free banking, so the only legal vehicle for qard-based finance at scale is the cooperative credit society, registered under state cooperative acts or the Multi-State Co-operative Societies Act 2002. Sahulat's role is promoter, incubator and standard-setter for those societies. It does not take deposits or lend money itself; its affiliates are separately registered cooperatives bound to Sahulat by a Memorandum of Co-operation under which Sahulat 'ensures the adherence of cooperative principles, application of interest-free principles, compliances of financial prudence, professional governance and indicators of social performance management' (sahulat.org/who-we-are, crawled 2026-08-06).

The scale disclosed is meaningful for a sector that barely registers in mainstream coverage. The who-we-are page counts 51 affiliated legal entities operating 101 branches; the homepage prints outreach as of 31 March 2025 of 14 states, 122 branches, more than 400,000 beneficiaries, INR 641 crore of cumulative loans disbursed, INR 49.29 crore of share capital and INR 388 crore of deposit balance. The gap between the two branch counts (101 versus 122) likely reflects different snapshot dates, and none of the network figures are independently audited at network level, a caveat worth stating plainly. Affiliates named on the site run from Al-Khair (Bihar, Jharkhand, UP, Delhi) to Bait-Un-Nasr (Mumbai suburbs) and the Seva and Khidmat societies in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

What makes Sahulat unusually useful is its publication habit. It hosts the text of the cooperative acts its affiliates register under, from the MSCS Act 2002 to the Maharashtra Co-operative Societies Act 1960, alongside model bylaws for new societies, GST advisories, and the RBI circular that prohibits cooperative societies from using the word 'bank' in their names, together with Sahulat's own advisory instructing affiliates to comply. It has also produced the only sector-wide studies of interest-free credit cooperative societies in India (IFCCS reports, 2019 and 2021), publishes the Sahulat Journal, and has posted annual reports from FY 2017-18 through FY 2023-24. For a segment where most operators have minimal websites, this is the primary documentary record.

The Shariah governance picture is the honest weak point. Sahulat publishes no Shariah supervisory board and names no scholars; interest-free adherence is a contractual and supervisory matter under the Memorandum of Co-operation, not a certified one. External recognition has come instead from the Islamic microfinance industry: the Best Islamic Microfinance Society Award at the Global Islamic Microfinance Conference in Istanbul (2017), the IFFSA Gold Award in Colombo (2018), Best Microfinance Project of the Year at IFFSA Maldives (2019) and a Delhi Minorities Commission community service award (2020). Those awards recognise the model's social performance, not its fiqh; users who need scholar-certified assurance will not find it anywhere in this sector, because no Indian credit cooperative publishes a Shariah board.

For HalalWallet readers the practical use of Sahulat is as a verification layer. Before joining any society that markets itself as interest-free, check three things: that it appears in Sahulat's affiliate list, that its registration number and permitted states are printed on its own site, and that its service-charge schedule is published. Sahulat membership is not a guarantee (affiliates are independent legal entities and cooperative deposits carry no DICGC insurance anywhere in this sector), but it is the best available signal that a society operates within the network's interest-free standards rather than as an unsupervised operator.