Laxmiben lives in a slum area in Ahmedabad with her four children. She supports her family by carrying cloth parcels on her head in the downtown cloth market. She inherited this work from her mother, and has done it all her life. Although Laxmiben's earnings are small and insecure, she is well respected among her fellow workers and the market's shopkeepers because she is the vice president of SEWA Bank – a women's cooperative set up by the nationwide Self Employed Women's Association. SEWA has been gaining strength in its work of helping to lift women out of poverty since 1972.
Laxmiben is part of India's vast informal economy, which includes door-to-door vegetable vendors, rickshaw pullers and rag-pickers, as well as garment and paperback makers, beedi rollers and food processors. In rural areas, the landless agricultural labourer, the woman crafts-worker, the silkworm farmer or the forest worker are all part of the crucial informal economy, which accounts for nearly 93 percent of the total workforce in India. And over half of them, 53 percent, are self-employed. Women constitute roughly 40 percent of this part of this economy, although official statistics often report significantly less. At the same time, informal-economy workers are extremely active economically, accounting for about 60 percent of India's GDP, over 50 percent of national savings, and about 47 percent of all exports.
In spite of these significant contributions, however, these workers remain at the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. Their earnings are low, just one-third that of formal-sector workers; their employment is insecure; and, especially in rural areas, they are often without work for several months every year. Unlike workers in the organised economy, they also have access to neither social security nor pension plans. Within the informal sector, women fare worse, earning the lowest amounts. Out of the entire female workforce in India, 94 percent toil in the informal sector.
It was as in an attempt to organise these workers that, in Ahmedabad in 1972, trade union leader Elaben Bhatt founded SEWA on Gandhian principles. Functioning as a trade union, SEWA operates through a joint strategy of struggle and development, with goals of full employment and self-reliance. Full employment includes four types of security: work, income, food and social. Today, SEWA has a membership of nearly 800,000 in nine states. By and large, SEWA members are poor women, traditional and deeply rooted in their communities. Throughout her life, a woman faces multiple needs and risks; Ela Bhatt believed that both the needs and the risks must be addressed if a woman is to emerge from poverty. Through SEWA, members struggle for their rights by building a mass movement of workers, grounded in the everyday issues of the women themselves. Local and national collective bargaining is subsequently able to take place with employers, contractors, municipal authorities, police, forest departments and the like.