Making it in India

• Author: Ashlin Mathew
• Position: News editor for the National Herald newspaper in New Delhi
• Pages: 15-17

R

adhika Baburao Shinde was all of 12

years old when she was married off to

a man who was 10 years older. She was

sent away to live with her new husband,

a truck driver, and his fami ly in remote, drought-

prone Satara district, 330 kilometers southwest

of Mumbai. She left school and went to work as a

laborer on her husband’s family farm.

When Shinde had children of her own—a

daughter and two sons— she wanted them to

have a better life. In villages across India, where

an estimated 833 million people live on less th an

$3.20 a day, it usually falls to women like Shinde

to take care of their c hildren and ensure they have

enough to eat.

A chance encounter in 2014 helped her break

the cycle of poverty. Employees of the Mann Deshi

Foundation, which teaches business skills and

lends money to rural women, arrived in her vil lage

offering trainin g in various trades for a nominal fee.

Shinde completed a 120-hour course in tailoring

and acquired the ski lls she needed to start a small

business catering to her neighbors, in add ition to

her farm work. is helped her earn the equiva-

lent of $5 a month to spend on her children—a

considerable sum for an area where the media n

household income was less than $70.

Her in-laws weren’t pleased. ey didn’t want

her new business to distract her from farming.

“ere were many fights, and eventually they

consented,” she recalls.

Labor force participation

e women-run Mann Deshi Foundation, estab-

lished in the 1990s, is among a handful of orga

-

nizations seeking to break down social, legal, and

economic barriers to women’s entrepreneurship in

India. Despite rapid growth, wide gender dispa rities

in the economic sphere have been stubbornly per-

sistent. e result has been a tra gic waste of human

potential that has ha mpered efforts to reduce poverty

in the world’s second most populous country.

Perhaps one of the starkest signs of Indian wom-

en’s plight is their labor force participation rate,

which was just 27 percent in 2017, about one-third

that of men. By that measure, India ra nks 120th

among 131 countries, according to data from the

World Bank. Women entrepreneurs do no better.

Only about 14 percent of Indian women own or

run businesses, according to the Sixth Economic

Census, conducted in 2014. More than 90 percent

of companies run by women are microenterprises ,

and about 79 percent are self-financed.

Women account for just 17 percent of GDP in

India, less than half the global average, Annette

Dixon, the World Bank’s vice president for South

Asia, said in a speec h in March of last year. If even

half of Indian women were in the lab or force, the

annual pace of economic grow th would rise by 1.5

percentage points to about 9 percent, she estimated .

e World Economic Forum’s Global Gender

Gap Report 2018 ranks 149 countries on four mea-

sures: economic participation and opportunity,

educational attainment, health and survival, and

political empowerment (see Picture is, in this

issue of F&D). India ranks 108th overall, with

particula rly low scores on two metrics: health and

survival a nd economic participation.

PHOTO: MANN DESHI FOUNDATION

g It

Rupali Shinde was able to expand her

family’s business, thanks to a loan from

the Mann Deshi Foundation.

March 2019 | FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT 15