On this 75th anniversary of India’s independence, the PM exhorted us to recognize Naari Shakti. From fighting for India’s freedom to being at the forefront in many fields like science and sports, the Indian woman is Shakti i.e. innate agency. Whenever the ecosystem has enabled or challenged women, the Shakti in women has responded appropriately.
Indian culture and traditions (C&T) are the composite and embedded system for women that provides them with the agency to navigate the myriad influences that they encounter as they progress. In women entrepreneurship, that Impactree promotes, the embedded C&T forms the core that governs the choices women entrepreneurs make to run their household and their enterprises. For Indian women, this is not an issue of a work-life balance or a choice that will relegate family to second place if women have to engage in growing their enterprise. The family, enterprise and community are viewed as a composite and integral to Indian C&T. Indeed, this amalgamation is evident as many large Indian corporations as well as small and medium enterprises (formal and informal) are family owned (estimated to be more than 80% of Indian businesses and contributing more than 70% of India’s GDP). The significance is recognized even in business schools in India where there are separate courses, even departments, on family-owned enterprises. The C&T ecosystem involving community members or extended kin become what I have called the ‘Circles of Trust’ for support to entrepreneurs and their families during distress and growth. Studies on impact of such support (conducted by Impactree) show how, even during the devastating Covid pandemic, many enterprises were cushioned by kinship networks and saved from shutting down.
In a largely agrarian society like India, where agriculture and allied livelihoods (such as livestock) has provided (and continues to provide) survival incomes, women’s work is home-based. Even with the introduction of small industries involving women (such as handicraft), women work in or near their homes. In India’s economy, this work is categorized to be in the “informal” sector. While the irregularity of work and incomes leading to vulnerability especially among poor families is acknowledged, Indian women have preferred home-based (or near-home) work to enable them to accomplish their multiple roles. The family and C&T ecosystem provides the support where needed—whether it is marketing, credit (especially start-up funds) or child-care. Educated and successful women in the formal sector too have preferred family-provided child-care (whenever possible) rather than institutionalized facilities.
In his 75th India Independence Day address, the PM outlined a five point agenda for the next 25 years. In addition to Naari Shakti, two other points he outlined are amplified with the perspective outlined in these paragraphs, namely, “breaking barriers to servitude and embrace Indian ideologies” and “taking pride in our heritage.” While certain frameworks and directions tell us that Indian women still need to be empowered [on parameters developed in other contexts and their C&Ts], the key to Impactree’s focus on women’s entrepreneurship is to begin with an enquiry on how Indian women harness their integral Shakti to traverse their many roles and make adjustments as they meet the future of livelihoods, innovation and growth through a process of negotiation, collaboration and creation. By attempting enterprise models and applying operating principles designed without understanding how the embeddedness in Indian C&T enables women to arrive at strategic choices, their in-built Shakti will get eroded and capsize their carefully navigated equilibrium.
At Impactree, building women’s competency and capability for entrepreneurship riding on the C&T embeddedness of Shakti is central to designing sustainable enterprises for women. In Rural India, for example, families and women in agriculture, engage in multi-livelihoods (cultivation, livestock, daily wage labor work locally and as migrants) to diversify their income sources and hedge their risks. It is a model of family enterprise that, being agrarian, is culturally and socially rooted in the local. Engagement with the market requires women to move beyond the local and become part of value chains. They have to be skilled, mentored and financed for roles that are non-traditional for women, such as aggregation and logistics. Family enterprises are helping women navigate this shift and build capability towards leadership in newer verticals in the value chain.
At Impactree, the understanding of C&T supported models for building women’s skill and capability in value chain enterprises and market-facing roles will be gathered in a program called Netri. Data using business, culture and social metrics to track and analyse women’s navigation and capability as they progress will be captured via a technology platform especially designed for the purpose.