Ahmed Patel was born on 21st August, 1949 into a Bharuch based agriculturalist family, as the third child of Mohammed Ishakji Patel and Hawaben Mohammedbhai. Mohammed Ishakji was one of the pioneers of South Gujarat’s cooperative union movement in the 1960’s to prevent exploitation of small borrowers by private moneylenders, who would charge exorbitant interest rates.
Ahmed Patel did his bachelor’s degree from Bharuch’s Jayendra Puri Arts and Science College. He was an active sportsman during his early days and captained for his college cricket and badminton tournaments. It was during his college days that he got involved into public life by assisting his father in the cooperative bank movement.
“The maturity of a society can be understood in the way it treats differently abled, children and the aged.”
Inspired by the cooperative model, Ahmed Patel administered Bharuch’s dairy cooperative in the early 1970’s.In 1976 Ahmed Patel married Smt Memoona Patel. Memoona belongs to a Gujarati trader family who settled in Myanmar. She comes from a family of freedom fighters who worked closely with Netaji Subhash Chandra Boses’s activities in Myanmar and Congress’s Seva Dal.
