SEWA and the Role of Women in Rural Labor Movements

In the dusty lanes of Ahmedabad in 1972, a small group of women came together to challenge a simple but stubborn truth: the women who hauled bricks, rolled bidis, picked rags, and stitched garments were the backbone of the economy, yet they were invisible to it. Out of that frustration emerged the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), an organisation that has since redefined what a labour union can look like when its members are poor, self-employed, and overwhelmingly rural. More than five decades later, SEWA’s story is one of the clearest examples of how women have mobilised, resisted exploitation, and built alternative economic structures on their own terms.

The world of work SEWA was born into 🔗

To understand SEWA’s significance, it helps to understand the labour landscape it confronts. Informal workers make up close to 90 percent of India’s workforce, and yet they remain largely unrecognised by labour laws, excluded from social security, and absent from collective bargaining structures. Women in this sector face an even sharper disadvantage. They work without fixed employers, without written contracts, and without the safety nets that formal employees take for granted.

SEWA was founded by Ela Bhatt, a lawyer and trade unionist who recognised early in her career that the existing union movement was built for factory workers, not for the millions of women who earned a living from home, the street, or the field. She began organising women in the textile trade and quickly realised that their needs spanned credit, healthcare, childcare, housing, and legal recognition. SEWA was registered as a trade union in 1972, and although it began in urban Ahmedabad, it spread into rural Gujarat by the late 1970s and is now active in 20 states with a membership that has crossed 3.78 million women.

How SEWA empowers rural women 🔗

SEWA’s central insight was that economic independence cannot be separated from social dignity. Rural women, especially those from marginalised castes and communities, often live within layered restrictions: limited mobility, no land in their own name, no access to formal credit, and no voice in household or village decisions. SEWA’s interventions were designed to dismantle these restrictions one by one.

Building financial independence 🔗

One of SEWA’s earliest and most radical experiments was the creation of its own bank. In 1974, about 4,000 self-employed women each contributed ten rupees to launch the Shri Mahila SEWA Cooperative Bank. Before this, most members were trapped between exploitative moneylenders who charged crushing interest rates and formal banks that refused to lend to women without collateral or literacy. The cooperative bank flipped this equation: members were the shareholders, the board members, and the borrowers all at once.

The bank also pioneered a savings-first model rather than the credit-first approach typical of microfinance. Members begin by depositing small amounts, which builds discipline, ownership, and resilience before any loan is taken. Loans are delivered through a network of Bank Sathis or “bank friends” – women from the same community who collect savings at the doorstep, verify loan applications, and provide financial counselling in a language and tone the borrower trusts. Interest on these loans is kept at around 1.5 percent per month, a fraction of the 5 to 10 percent typically charged by private moneylenders.

Securing labour rights 🔗

For workers who have no employer to bargain with, the very idea of a labour right needs to be reimagined. SEWA approaches this through a triple strategy: union membership for collective voice, cooperatives for collective production, and policy advocacy for legal recognition. Its push for the rights of informal workers contributed directly to landmark national legislation, including the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act of 2008, the National Rural Livelihoods Mission of 2011, and the Street Vendors Act of 2014. Each of these laws extends a measure of protection to workers who had historically been outside the reach of labour codes.

Strategies for organising informal workers 🔗

SEWA’s organising model is unusual because it does not assume a workplace, a boss, or a fixed wage. Instead, it builds power around the daily realities of its members – their crafts, their savings groups, their water sources, and their children’s schools. Three strategies stand out.

Microfinance built around the worker 🔗

Unlike many later microfinance institutions that focused narrowly on lending, SEWA’s financial services are tied to a wider ecosystem of training, insurance, and childcare. The cooperative bank has broken the cycle of indebtedness by helping women bargain better prices, form their own economic units, and slowly develop the confidence to deal with formal institutions. Members report increases in household income, but equally important is the shift in self-perception: they begin to see themselves as workers and savers rather than as dependents.

Legal literacy as a tool of power 🔗

Many informal women workers do not know what protections, schemes, or identities they are legally entitled to. SEWA invests heavily in legal awareness, running ideology and legal trainings in slum colonies and villages that explain rights, government procedures, and the specific laws that apply to street vendors, domestic workers, agricultural labourers, and home-based workers. The aim is not just legal information but legal confidence – the willingness to approach a panchayat office, a police station, or a labour department without fear.

Cooperative principles for collective strength 🔗

SEWA has built more than 130 cooperatives and hundreds of producer groups in sectors ranging from dairy and agriculture to embroidery and salt farming. The cooperative model means that women co-own the means of production, share in the profits, and participate in decision-making. This matters because it transforms women from piece-rate workers paid by middlemen into stakeholders with a voice in pricing, marketing, and reinvestment. In Banaskantha district, for example, SEWA worked with women from the Ahir, Jat, Rabari, and Mochi communities to convert their inherited embroidery skills into a commercially viable cluster, ensuring that traditional craft became a source of dignified income rather than exploitation by middlemen.

Women’s leadership and the grassroots model 🔗

Perhaps SEWA’s most distinctive feature is its insistence that leadership must come from within the community of workers, not from outside experts. The organisation deliberately invests in growing women leaders from the membership base, and this has shaped its grassroots character.

The aagewan: woman who comes forward 🔗

At the heart of SEWA’s local structure is the aagewan, a Gujarati term that roughly translates to “the woman who comes forward.” Aagewans are members who naturally take on leadership in their community and are trained to become the link between SEWA’s staff and the wider membership. They are champions of the SEWA philosophy and drive the union’s organising and advocacy work at the village or neighbourhood level. Because they are workers themselves, they understand the texture of the issues – a delayed wage, an unfair contractor, a sick child, a lost ration card – in a way no outside organiser could.

Schools for grassroots managers 🔗

SEWA has formalised this leadership development through the SEWA Academy, launched in 1991, and the SEWA Managers’ School established in 2005, which provides management training specifically for grassroots women. Members are trained in literacy, communication, research, documentation, and the running of cooperatives. This is a quiet but powerful inversion of how development usually works: the women who were once considered too poor or too illiterate to be leaders are now the ones managing institutions worth crores of rupees.

Childcare, healthcare, and the full-life worker 🔗

SEWA’s grassroots model also recognises that a woman worker is never only a worker. She is a mother, a daughter-in-law, a caregiver, and a community member, and her productivity is shaped by every one of these roles. Providing childcare in Kheda and Surendranagar districts, for instance, led to income increases of around 50 percent among participating women, because mothers could finally work without the constant interruption of childcare duties. Health cooperatives, food security campaigns, and housing schemes such as Pakki Bheet – which insisted that homes rebuilt after the 2024 Gujarat floods be registered in the woman’s name – extend this philosophy of treating the worker as a whole person.

What SEWA’s mobilisation teaches us 🔗

SEWA’s story sits at the intersection of three movements that often run on parallel tracks: the labour movement, the cooperative movement, and the women’s movement. By weaving them together, it has shown that resistance does not have to mean confrontation alone. It can also mean building. Building a bank when banks refuse to lend. Building cooperatives when employers refuse to recognise. Building leadership when society refuses to listen. The result is a model that has been replicated in other parts of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and that continues to influence how policymakers think about informal work today.

For students of women in the economy, SEWA is not just a case study but a reminder that economic structures are not natural or inevitable. They are made, and they can be remade – sometimes by the very people they were designed to exclude.

What do you think? If informal workers make up nearly 90 percent of India’s workforce, why do you think mainstream labour laws and unions have historically struggled to reach them? And what do you see as the limits of a grassroots model like SEWA’s when it tries to scale across very different regions, languages, and trades?

References

1. https://www.sewa.org/
2. https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/union-informal-workers-how-does-work-more-50-years-women-india-have-been-supporting-each
3. https://aif.org/on-international-day-of-cooperatives-lessons-from-sewa-bank/
4. https://sewabharat.org/what-we-do/financial-inclusion/
5. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/self-employed-womens-association-sewa
6. https://www.gdrc.org/icm/inspire/sewa.html
7. https://sewadelhi.org/programs/organizing/
8. https://rangde.in/blog/self-employed-women-association-SEWA/
9. https://sewabharat.org/members-and-aagewans/
10. https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_emp/@emp_policy/documents/publication/wcms_234890.pdf
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_Employed_Women%27s_Association
12. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Self-Employed-Womens-Association