“Why should there be a difference between worker and worker, whether they are working in a factory or at home?

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 .

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 swiftly globalizing economy. She has built a formidable empire of womenrun, Gandhian-style cooperatives - 100 at last count - some providing child care for working mothers, others selling sesame seeds to Indian foodprocessing firms - all modeled after the Gandhian ideal of self-sufficiency.

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

Her quest offers a glimpse into the changing desires of Indian women. 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.

The share of Indians employed in the informal sector - where they are not covered by socialist-era labor laws from the time of the cold war - has grown to more than 90 percent since 1991, according to a recent 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 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.

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.

With money from her business, Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at home, added a loft and bought a washing machine.“Now, with my earnings, my children are studying,”she said.

“The computer is also from my parlor money,”she added. A daughter is enrolled in a private English school.

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 union for women.

At first, the women 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. 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.”