Bio
Ganesh Gopal is a researcher, cooperative practitioner, and Ph.D. student at Gandhigram Rural Institute (Tamil Nadu, India), specializing in platform cooperatives and the future of work. He is the Lead for Entrepreneurship Development at ICA Asia and Pacific (ICA-AP) and a Board Member at the National Institute of Personnel Management, Thiruvananthapuram.
As a 2025/2026 Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE), Ganesh’s research offers a policy analysis and comparative case studies of state-led cooperative digital economy initiatives in India, examining the rise and decline faced by alternative ride-hailing platforms like ‘Kerala Savaari’ and ‘Namma Yatri,’ and ‘Yaary’ to understand how they could work better.
He is currently piloting the WaaS Cooperative Project in Kerala, a platform co-op enabling sanitation workers to collectively own a digital platform connecting wastewater services directly to customers. Ganesh co-founded Tinkerhub, Kerala’s largest tech-skilling network, and the Centre for Development Initiatives (CDI), advancing cooperative entrepreneurship and youth engagement.