Before she rose

The trade union she worked for dismissed her work with informal women workers as not "real" labor organizing.

She was told that women who worked from home, in the streets, in the informal economy — selling, carrying, stitching — were not workers in any meaningful legal or political sense. The systems built for workers had been built without them in mind. She spent her life changing those systems.

LeadershipIndiaJustice

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Ela Bhatt

1933–2022 · Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

She organized the women no one else thought needed organizing — the street vendors, the rag pickers, the home-based workers. 2 million women joined her.

The small and marginal are not the problem — they are the solution.

— Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA

In 1972, Ela Bhatt was a lawyer working for a textile workers' union in Ahmedabad. She began meeting the women who worked outside the factories — the women who carried loads on their heads, who stitched piecework at home, who sold vegetables in the street. No one was counting them. No one was organizing them. She founded SEWA — the Self Employed Women's Association — to change that.

Her story

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SEWA — the Self Employed Women's Association — became the world's largest union of informal sector workers.

At its peak, SEWA had over 2 million members: women who had never before had a union, a bank, a collective voice.

She met a woman who carried heavy loads at the market for ₹2 a day. The woman had no contract, no security, no rights, no organization. Ela wrote her name in a notebook.

That notebook became SEWA. That woman became one of 2 million.

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SEWA Bank — founded in 1974 — became India's first cooperative bank for poor women.

Women who had never had a bank account, who kept savings in clay pots, who were turned away from every formal financial institution, now had a bank they owned.

Ela Bhatt was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Indira Gandhi Prize, and the Padma Bhushan. She served on the boards of international organizations.

She always wore a simple cotton sari. She always returned to the women in Ahmedabad.

She said: "The poor are not a problem to be solved. They are human beings with capabilities, with dignity, with the right to organize."

She spent 50 years proving it.

What she taught us

◈The person the system overlooked is often the person who changes the system.
◈Organizing begins with writing one person's name in a notebook.
◈Dignity is not a reward for success — it is the starting point.

The small and marginal are not the problem — they are the solution.

— Ela Bhatt, Ela Bhatt, founder of SEWA

Her story. Your life.

A question worth sitting with

Ela Bhatt started by meeting one woman carrying loads in a market and listening to her story. Who in your own world — a person overlooked, underpaid, uncounted — are you in a position to actually see?

Take sixty seconds. Just sit with it.

A letter from her — to you

Dear you, I want to talk to you about the ones who are not in the room. In every conversation about progress, every policy meeting, every organization talking about helping "women" — there are always women who are not represented. The ones whose labor is invisible. The ones who work in ways the system was not built to recognize. The ones who, when they appear in statistics at all, are listed under "other." I spent my life sitting with those women. Learning their names, their work, their daily economics, their dignity. And what I found was this: they were not lacking capability, or willingness, or intelligence. They were lacking an organization that believed they were worth organizing. You are surrounded by people who are not in the room. Some of them are asking, without words, to be seen. You don't have to build a 2-million-person union. You can start with one name in a notebook. One conversation. One person whose reality you actually try to understand before you speak about what they need. That is where it starts. It always starts there. With love and solidarity, Ela

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