Ela Bhatt was a lawyer for an Indian textile union in the early 1970s when she decided to help other types of workers, ones who were harder to organize and often barely noticed: women balancing heavy loads of fabric, often perched precariously atop their heads, to make deliveries to markets.
She founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association, known as SEWA, in 1972 in her hometown of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat.
It became one of the country’s strongest advocates for India’s millions of women working informally in many kinds of low-paid positions, including maids, vegetable sellers, street food vendors, seamstresses and cigarette rollers.
They often kept their families afloat by patching together work of all kinds—yet weren’t even recognized as workers in India’s official census data.