The Union of Self-Employed Women

In the cloth markets of old Ahmedabad, at the start of the 1970s, women carried bales of cloth on their heads from the wholesale shops to the waiting carts and back again. The loads were heavy, the lanes were narrow and the pay was a few coins a trip, if the merchant chose to pay at all.

Most of these women had come to the city from villages, looking for work. Many slept on the pavement. They had no contract, no employer they could name and no one to complain to.

One day a group of them came to see a young woman who worked for the city's textile workers' union. Her name was Ela Bhatt.

The lawyer in the union office

Ela Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad on 7 September 1933. Her family valued learning and public service, and she grew up in the years when Gandhi's ideas about simple living and the dignity of labour were everywhere in Gujarat.

She studied law and, in 1955, joined the legal department of the Textile Labour Association, the great union of Ahmedabad's mill workers, which Gandhi himself had helped to found. Later she was put in charge of its women's wing.

The union looked after mill workers, who had wages, factories and employers. But Bhatt began to notice how many women around those mills worked outside that world altogether. They rolled bidis at home, stitched garments, sold vegetables, collected waste paper, pulled carts and carried loads. Their earnings kept whole families alive, but in the eyes of the law and the official statistics, they hardly existed.

A union with no employer

The women of the cloth market wanted what any group of workers wants: a fair rate for their labour, and someone to speak for them. With Bhatt's help, they began to organise.

In 1972, they and other self-employed women formed the Self Employed Women's Association, or SEWA. The word sewa also means service.

When they applied to register SEWA as a trade union, the labour officials refused. A union, they said, existed to bargain with an employer, and these women had none. Bhatt argued that a union was about workers coming together, not about having a boss to oppose. After a long argument, SEWA was registered.

It was a quiet victory with a large meaning. Women who sold on the street or worked at home were now recognised as workers.

A bank of their own

Very soon the members ran into another wall. To buy vegetables to sell, or cloth to stitch, they needed small sums of money. Banks would not lend to them, so they borrowed from moneylenders at crushing rates of interest, and stayed in debt for years.

So in 1974 the women started their own bank. Thousands of members put in a few rupees each to raise its first capital, and the Mahila SEWA Sahakari Bank was registered as a cooperative.

Bhatt later wrote that when the bank was being registered, an official objected that many of the women could not sign their names. The members' answer was to learn to sign. The bank's staff, many of them from the same background as its customers, learned to lend in ways that suited people who were paid daily and kept their savings in small amounts. The loans were repaid.

Growing slowly, from the ground

SEWA grew the way its members worked: patiently, one need at a time. Vegetable sellers in the city fought for the right to keep their places in the market without being chased away. Members set up cooperatives for embroidery, dairy work and cleaning services. SEWA began to offer health care, childcare and insurance to women who had never had any.

In 1981, after a disagreement with the Textile Labour Association over SEWA's public stand during caste unrest in the city, SEWA was asked to leave. It carried on alone, and kept growing. Today it has well over a million members across India.

Bhatt received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1977 and the Right Livelihood Award in 1984, and India awarded her the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. She served in the Rajya Sabha, helped found Women's World Banking, and in later life joined The Elders, a group of senior world figures working for peace and human rights.

The quiet strength of many

Ela Bhatt died in Ahmedabad on 2 November 2022, at the age of eighty-nine.

She never thought of SEWA as charity. She believed that poor working women did not need to be rescued. They needed to be counted, organised and given the tools to run things for themselves. The title of her book about SEWA says it simply: We Are Poor but So Many.

Want to read more?

Ela Bhatt's We Are Poor but So Many tells the story of SEWA through the lives of its members. Kalima Rose's Where Women Are Leaders is a fuller history of the movement's early years. SEWA's own website describes its work today.