If a cooperative, for instance a sugar cooperative, becomes sick due to mismanagement or natural calamities the state government provides financial relief in the form of subsidies or soft loans or waiver of taxes. In the current year, sugar cooperatives faced a glut following a bumper crop, which resulted in excess cane remaining uncrushed. To bail out the sugar industry the state government has waived purchase tax worth Rs 254 crore, provided transport subsidy to transport cane from fields to factory of Rs 15 crore, and declared a compensation of Rs 25,000 per hectare for sugarcane that remained uncrushed.

• Are these empires confined to a particular political party or parties? Or to a specific region of the state?

Ever since the formation of the Maharashtra state 47 years ago, politicians from the Congress (and those who were groomed in the Congress but subsequently broke away to form separate parties) have controlled the state, except for four years, 1995 to 1999, when the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance ruled it. The Congress started the cooperative-politics pattern; and the other parties are following it.

This phenomenon is not confined to a particular region. However, the cooperative movement is more powerful in pockets of western and southern Maharashtra where the land is fertile and irrigation facilities are in abundance.

• Is this nexus seen to be controversial in the state? Which was the last such controversy?

There have been intermittent controversies. The last one broke out about five years ago over the payment of dues to the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company by the Mula Pravara electricity cooperative society established by the Vikhe-Patils in 1969. The society buys power from MSEB and distributes it to 183 villages in Shrirampur and Rahuri tehsils of Ahmednagar district. The society owes Rs 380 crore to the state distribution company. The MSEB has been sending notices, but there has been a lack of will to take action. The Nagpur bench of the High Court had ordered that the society be liquidated, but the matter went into appeal.

... contd.