SEWA, the Union Ela Bhatt Registered in Ahmedabad on 12 April 1972, Now Counts 3.78 Million Women Informal Workers in 20 States and Runs Its Own Bank

The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) was registered as a trade union in Ahmedabad on 12 April 1972. On its own website SEWA now counts 3.78 million women members in 20 states and calls itself the largest central trade union of women workers in India’s informal economy, meaning work with no regular employer or contract. Membership costs Rs 10 a year. Members include vegetable vendors, incense-stick rollers, junksmiths and waste recyclers, in more than 125 trades according to SEWA.

Its founder, Ela Bhatt, was a lawyer born in Ahmedabad on 7 September 1933. She was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1977 and the Right Livelihood Award in 1984, and the Gazette of India lists her as a Padma Shri awardee in 1985 and a Padma Bhushan awardee in 1986. She died on 2 November 2022, aged 89.

A union for women who had no employer

SEWA grew out of the women’s wing of the Textile Labour Association (TLA), which SEWA’s history page says was founded in 1920 by Anasuya Sarabhai and Mahatma Gandhi. In 1977, the Magsaysay Foundation’s citation puts the TLA at 120,000 members in 60 Ahmedabad textile mills. The wing taught the wives and daughters of mill workers sewing, spinning and knitting. Right Livelihood’s profile says Bhatt headed it by 1968.

In 1971, SEWA’s account says, migrant women who pulled handcarts and carried cloth bundles on their heads in Ahmedabad’s cloth market came to the TLA asking for decent wages. Bhatt sat in the market and listened, then wrote a newspaper article on their pay. Merchants replied in print that they paid fair wages, and the women’s wing reprinted that claim on small cards and handed them out across the market, and used-clothes dealers then came with grievances of their own. More than a hundred women met in a public park and proposed an association. December 1971 is the date SEWA gives for the idea, put forward by Bhatt and the TLA president, Arvind Buch.

Registration was the first hurdle. According to SEWA’s history, the state Labour Department refused to register the group because a union needs an employer to organise against. The women’s reply was that a union exists to unify workers and does not need an employer to justify it. That argument prevailed, and SEWA was registered on 12 April 1972, a day it marks as Self-Employed Day.

Poverty among the women it enrolled was severe. The Magsaysay citation of 1977, describing self-employed women in Ahmedabad, says nearly 97 per cent lived in slums, 93 per cent were illiterate and 60 per cent were in debt, with earnings of US$0.25 to US$1.70 a day. Within three years SEWA had enrolled over 5,000 members, by the Magsaysay citation, and 7,000 by Right Livelihood’s profile. By December 1995, Right Livelihood says, it had 218,700 members, which it describes as the largest single union in India.

Four thousand women, Rs 10 each

A bank followed two years later. SEWA Bank’s own history lists three reasons: members needed working capital, wanted to escape moneylenders, and wanted a safe place for savings. Their dealings with formal banks had shown how hard it was for them to get service. In the bank’s account, the members said “We may be poor”, “but we are so many”. About 4,000 self-employed women put in Rs 10 each as share capital, and in May 1974 the Shri Mahila SEWA Co-operative Bank was registered under the dual control of the Reserve Bank of India and the state government.

Three years on, the Magsaysay citation described the bank: shares of US$1.30 each, 4,500 shareholders, and about 10,000 women who had deposited some US$35,000. For 2024-25 the bank’s statistical table shows 131,559 shareholder members, 319,409 accounts, Rs 344.85 crore in deposits and Rs 218.38 crore in advances to 359,186 borrower accounts. Profit that year was Rs 1.22 crore, against Rs 2.57 crore in 2023-24.

Union and cooperatives together

Its stated method is the joint action of a union and cooperatives. Members get a voice from the union. Cooperatives are enterprises the women own and manage, for trade, credit, health care, child care, insurance and housing. On the About page, SEWA lists 4,813 self-help groups, 160 cooperatives, 15 economic federations and 3 producer companies. WIEGO’s Marty Chen, writing at Bhatt’s death, counted a cooperative bank, an insurance cooperative and over 100 producer and service cooperatives, so the totals depend on what is counted and when.

By its own account, SEWA follows four Gandhian principles: satya (truth), ahimsa (non-violence), sarvadharma (respect for all faiths) and khadi (local employment and self-reliance). SEWA’s history adds that by 1981 relations with the TLA were strained and Ahmedabad’s mills were closing, and that the TLA then withdrew its support, after which SEWA set its own course. Another women-owned enterprise, Lijjat Papad, began in Mumbai in 1959; the TLA itself dates to Gandhi’s work in Ahmedabad.

How the union is run

Legally, SEWA is registered under the Indian Trade Unions Act of 1926. According to the structure page, the members of each trade elect representatives, one for every 1,500 members, who form a Trade Council. Every three years the council elects a 25-member Executive Committee, and it has become the practice to elect the president from the trade with the most members.

Membership figures have risen over the years. Right Livelihood and WIEGO both gave “more than 2 million” in November 2022. Today the site gives 3.78 million, in 20 states, with headquarters in Ahmedabad. Those counts were made at different dates, and SEWA’s is the latest.

The convention agreed in Geneva in 1996

Its campaigning reached the International Labour Organization, which adopted the Home Work Convention (No. 177) at Geneva on 20 June 1996, and it entered into force on 22 April 2000. Right Livelihood’s profile records that SEWA campaigned for it, and WIEGO’s account says Bhatt asked Marty Chen, now of WIEGO, in June 1995 for statistics on home-based workers to convince the employer groups blocking the text. When the Convention passed, WIEGO says, Bhatt and her SEWA colleague Renana Jhabvala sent a postcard from Geneva: “The employers had their ideology. The workers had their statistics. The Convention was passed!”

WIEGO describes C177 as the first ILO Convention to cover a group made up mainly of women workers in the informal economy. It also reported in June 2016 that only 10 countries had ratified it, and called for a ratification campaign. According to Chen, Bhatt co-founded WIEGO and was the first chair of its board, with Jhabvala the second.

The street vendors law of 2014

SEWA’s campaign paper estimates that India has 50 to 60 lakh (5 to 6 million) street vendors, with the largest numbers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. It says SEWA was the first to describe the “natural markets” where vendors gather by demand, outside temples or in residential lanes. The Lok Sabha passed the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Bill on 6 September 2013 and the Rajya Sabha on 19 February 2014, according to the Press Information Bureau. In the PIB’s summary, the Bill provides for protection of vendors’ livelihood rights, their social security and regulation of urban street vending.

According to its campaign paper, SEWA advocated hard for the law, and Right Livelihood’s profile says SEWA’s decades of advocacy contributed to its passage. A 2019 PIB release from the Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry said most states had notified rules and schemes under the Act and described it as protecting the rights of urban street vendors.

What the next stage looks like

States carry out the Act, and the work continues. PRS Legislative Research’s summary of the Standing Committee on Urban Development’s report of 6 August 2021 says many provisions were yet to be implemented by several states and union territories, and that town vending committees, which register vendors and issue vending certificates, had not been constituted in several. The campaign paper makes the same point about state rules and committees, and its long-term campaign lists seeking vendor representation on the committees.

A news item on SEWA’s website dated 3 November 2026 reports the launch of Kaushalya, the SEWA-Bagchi Skill Institute for Women Workers, to mark 2 November as International Day of Women Workers in the Informal Economy.