‘Self-employed women build India everyday’

Mirai Chatterjee

is director of the social security team at the Self-Employed Women’s Association (

SEWA

). Speaking to

Times Evoke

, she outlines the enormous work done by women in the informal economy:
The informal economy in India employs 94% of the country’s female workforce. The largest kind of work is manual labour and service providers like

agricultural

, construction and domestic workers. The next group is home-based workers making garments, wrapping sweets, rolling incense sticks, etc. The third category is street vendors. The fourth category is what we at SEWA call small producers or own account workers doing food processing, weaving baskets, etc. They put in the capital and labour themselves and undertake market risks. These four categories of women’s work are found in every country.

THEY BUILD OUR WORLD: Women workers in India contribute enormously to sectors like farming and construction. Photo Courtesy: SEWAThere is a huge array of occupations thus needing skill upgrades. There are highly skilled artisanal workers doing exquisite embroidery. Their skilling needs include new marketable designs, ensuring quality checks, etc. There are also women construction workers, many of whom carry loads of bricks, whom we help train to do more specialised masonry work like tiling. In agriculture, young women farmers now want to learn how to use power tractors and power tillers. Skilling also helps develop marketable products — many of our waste-picker sisters formed a stationery cooperative. Picking paper off the streets, they’ve learnt how to handle this to make files and notebooks.

Photo Courtesy: SEWA


Skilling is very important for women as they usually get the most hazardous and laborious tasks. Men get access to machines quickly but the heavy lifting stays with women. Even in MGNREGA, you see more women than men toiling under the hot sun. There is gender discrimination with harder work, less work security and lower wages for women. Their work also receives little social regard. Society undervalues their efforts so much that when you ask women workers what they do, they often say, ‘Nothing much.’ One of our first tasks at SEWA is to get women to value their own work — only then will society recognise their effort. The second task is to help form collectives to enhance bargaining power and gain the attention of policy makers.

SHE HEWS, SHE SEWS: Home-based women workers embellishing fabrics or making handicrafts are widespread. Photo Courtesy: SEWAWomen’s work is awe-inspiring. We often joke with our members, what would happen if women stopped cleaning, cooking, farming, building roads, looking after elders and children and so on? The entire country would come to a standstill. To correct the undervaluing of their work, we advocate for a more enabling environment by governments — this involves full employment with work and income security, food security and social security, comprising healthcare, childcare, insurance, pensions and housing with sanitation and basic infrastructure. For economic empowerment, we help women access capitalisation, obtain assets in their name and capacity building, including technical, leadership and management training alongside gaining a greater voice — it really hurts informal sector women workers that despite their huge contribution to India’s GDP, they have very littlerepresentation at the policy table.



One worker I’m in awe of is a woman farmer named Chanchal ben who lives near bustling Ahmedabad. She comes from a very deprived community, is differently abled and poor. When SEWA women members asked her to be their village health worker, she said she lacked motivation because no one had ever bothered about her. The men in the village couldn’t believe we’d asked her to be the health worker. Privileged communities even said they’d never take medicines from her hand.

Now, 25 years later, not only are they taking medicines and advice from her, they asked her to stand in the panchayat elections for sarpanch. Some time ago, she travelled to Mumbai and at a ceremony among corporate CEOs, she told her story of empowerment through her SEWA health collective. She got a standing ovation — and the CEOs were wiping away tears at what she had accomplished. Today, she’s training young women to become health workers. Imagine what we can make India if we empower the women who power its economy.