An Empire for Poor Working Women, Guided by a Gandhian Approach

March 7, 2009
THE SATURDAY PROFILE


By SOMINI SENGUPTA
AHMADABAD, India

THIRTY-FIVE years ago in this once thriving textile town, Ela Bhatt 
fought for higher wages for women who ferried bolts of cloth on their 
heads. Next, she created India’s first women’s bank.

Since then, her Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, has 
offered retirement accounts and health insurance to women who never 
had a safety net, lent working capital to entrepreneurs to open beauty 
salons in the slums, helped artisans sell their handiwork to new urban 
department stores and boldly trained its members to become gas station 
attendants — an unusual job for women on the bottom of India’s social 
ladder.

Small, slight and usually dressed in a hand-spun cotton sari, Mrs. 
Bhatt is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India.

At 76, she is a critic of some of India’s embrace of market reforms, 
but nevertheless keen to see the poorest of Indian workers get a stake 
in the country’s swelling and swiftly globalizing economy. She has 
built a formidable empire of women-run, Gandhian-style cooperatives — 
100 at last count — some providing child care for working mothers, 
others selling sesame seeds to Indian food-processing firms — all 
modeled after the Gandhian ideal of self-sufficiency but also 
advancing modern ambitions.

She calls it the quest for economic freedom in a democratic India.

Her own quest offers a glimpse into the changing desires of Indian 
mothers and daughters, along with their vulnerabilities. Tinsmiths or 
pickle makers, embroiderers or vendors of onions, SEWA’s members are 
mostly employed in the informal sector. They get no regular paychecks, 
sick leave or holidays. Calamities are always just around the corner, 
whether traffic accidents or crippling droughts. Without SEWA, they 
would be hard pressed to have health benefits or access to credit.

SEWA’s innovations bear lessons for the majority of workers in the new 
Indian economy. Since economic reforms kicked off in 1991, the share 
of Indians employed in the informal sector — where they are not 
covered by stringent, socialist-era labor laws from the time of the 
cold war — has grown steadily to more than 90 percent, according to a 
recent government-commissioned report.

Among them, the report found, nearly three-fourths lived on less than 
20 cents a day and had virtually no safety net. “Why should there be a 
difference between worker and worker,” Mrs. Bhatt wondered aloud, 
“whether they are working in a factory, or at home or on the footpath?”

WITH 500,000 members in western Gujarat State alone, the SEWA empire 
also includes two profit-making firms that stitch and embroider 
women’s clothing. More than 100,000 women are enrolled in the 
organization’s health and life insurance plans. Its bank has 350,000 
depositors and, like most microfinance organizations, a repayment rate 
as high as 97 percent. Loans range from around $100 to $1,100, with a 
steep interest rate of 15 percent. “We don’t have a liquidity 
problem,” its manager, Jayshree Vyas, pointed out merrily. “Women save.”

A SEWA loan of roughly $250 allowed Namrata Rajhari to start a beauty 
salon 15 years ago from her one-room shack in a working-class enclave 
called Behrampura. At first, the neighborhood women knew little about 
beauty treatments. They only wanted their hair trimmed.

Then Mrs. Rajhari began threading their eyebrows to resemble perfect 
half-moons, waxing the hair off their forearms and offering facials. 
During the wedding season, business blossomed. Mrs. Rajhari, who only 
has a 10th-grade education, expanded to a small room in the next lane.

With money from her business, Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at home, 
added a loft and bought a washing machine. “Before, I felt blank. I 
didn’t know anything about the world,” she said the other day. “Now, 
with my earnings, my children are studying.”

Mrs. Rajhari then motioned to an object of pride in the living room. 
“The computer is also from my parlor money,” she beamed. A daughter, 
Srishti, is now enrolled in a private English school. She wants to be 
an astronomer.

Behrampura buzzed with work and hustle on this morning. Men 
disassembled old television sets and put together new sofas. A woman 
pushed a cart loaded with used suitcases. Another herded a half-dozen 
donkeys loaded with construction debris.

Nearby, in another slum, shortly after dawn, Naina Chauhan rode a 
motorized rickshaw across town to start her shift as a gas station 
attendant. Her mother, Hira, now 65, had spent a lifetime ferrying 
coal, cleaning hospitals and going house to house to collect old 
newspapers. Naina said she resolved never to slog as her mother had.

Today, she contributes about $1 a month to her own SEWA-run pension 
plan. A SEWA loan has allowed her to clear a debt from relatives. She 
easily makes three times what her mother made collecting newspapers 
and as she shyly admitted this afternoon, almost as much as her 
husband, a hospital cleaner. She just recently married, and plans to 
move into her husband’s family home soon. She said she hoped he would 
let her manage at least some of her own money.

Mrs. Bhatt’s Gandhian approach is most evident in the way she lives. 
Her two-bedroom bungalow is small and spare. The one bit of whimsy is 
a white swing that hangs from the ceiling in the center of the living 
room. She uses her bed as a desk chair. Her grandson has painted a 
child’s pastoral mural on the bedroom wall. She is known for having no 
indulgences.

“Above all you should emphasize her simplicity,” said Anil Gupta, a 
professor at the Indian Institute of Management here who has followed 
SEWA’s work for over a decade, sometimes critically. “In her personal 
life, there is not the slightest tinge of hypocrisy.”

Mrs. Bhatt is not without detractors. The chief minister of Gujarat, 
Narendra Modi, accused her group of financial irregularities three 
years ago in the management of a rehabilitation program for earthquake 
victims. SEWA denied the charges and pulled out of the government-run 
program. Mrs. Bhatt accused Mr. Modi of trying to discredit the 
organization. Their war of words has since cooled down.

BORN to a privileged Brahmin family, Mrs. Bhatt charted an unusual 
path for a woman of her time. She earned a law degree and chose the 
man she would marry. She began her career as a lawyer for the city’s 
main union for textile workers, the vast majority of them men, and 
broke away in 1981 to create a new kind of union for women.

Early on, she won higher rates for women porters, then a landmark 
legal victory that allowed women to sell fruits and vegetables on the 
street without harassment from the police. The fishmongers and quilt-
makers who were SEWA Bank’s earliest customers sometimes stashed their 
checkbooks in the bank’s steel cabinets, she recalled, lest their 
husbands discover they had money of their own.

At first, the women’s ambitions were limited, she said. They wanted 
toilets, hair shears or sewing machines for work and money to pay for 
their children’s school fees. Slowly, she noticed, they began to dream 
big. Mothers now want their daughters to learn to ride a scooter and 
work on a computer.

“They didn’t see the future at that time,” she said. “Expectations 
have gone very high.”

Not long ago, Mrs. Bhatt recalled, she asked SEWA members what 
“freedom” meant to them. Some said it was the ability to step out of 
the house. Others said it was having a door to the bathroom. Some said 
it meant having their own money, a cellphone, or “fresh clothes every 
day.”

Then she told of her favorite. Freedom, one woman said, was “looking a 
policeman in the eye.”


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company