“We have been transformed from bahu (bride) to ben (sister),” laughs Puriben. “My son calls me as saab (boss), and when my telephone rings, my husband runs around telling everybody to keep quiet so that I can talk on the phone.”

Ela Bhatt’s We are Poor but so Many: the Story of Self Employed Women in India is the story of Puriben, and of lakhs of other bens in rural and urban India, all empowered by women led institutions that provide economic and social support to female workers in the informal economy. The book traces the trajectory of the trade union movement called SEWA: Self Employed Women’s Association, and explores how this women’s union led to the birth of Mahila Mandalis, cooperatives and women leaders of note. It also provides an insight into the daily lives of the women whose work sustains not only their families but are the backbone of the Indian economies – encompassing female hawkers, rag pickers, agricultural workers, salt farmers, quilt tailors, embroiders and dam project affected women. Also discussed in depth is the microfinance institution SEWA Bank. The bank was ideated to rid the system of middlemen and corruption. SEWA members own stock in the bank, and the institution is built around the ideas of entrepreneurship and saving. This section becomes important in light of popular microfinance literature that establishes women as better borrowers because they generate wealth for the entire family’s nutrition and health related outcomes.

The author, Ela Bhatt, acknowledging that she remains an outsider to these women’s lives, is a Gandhian activist and founder of the trade union SEWA and the SEWA Bharat movement. Bhatt is the recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership (1977), the Right Livelihood Award (1984) for "helping home-based producers to organise for their welfare and self-respect" and the Padma Bhushan (1986). She is also the founder of Women’s World Banking, which provides support to 40 microfinance institutions across the world that focus on providing banking services to vulnerable and poverty stricken women.

 This book is a fascinating exploration in what it is like being thrice cursed yet thrice empowered: being poor and self employed and a woman in India. For those interested in public policy, political economy, labour economics, development economics, gender studies and Indian economy, this serves as an indispensable guiding document: available for issue in our very own Department Library!

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BY Urvi Sikri