Ela Bhatt, whose Self-Employed Women’s Association offers a safety net to poor working women, is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India. Somini Sengupta in The New York Times:
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 on the bottom of India’s social ladder.
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