India is home to over 1.3-1.5 crore women-owned businesses as per various estimates. Meanwhile, as per data from Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) in 2021, at least 45 percent of around 50,000 ministry-recognised startups were run by women.
While policies to encourage women's participation are on the rise, the mindset of society towards women continues to haunt this overall agenda.
Richa Jaggi is a co-founder of Awshad, a cannabis wellness startup. While she feels her sector has been very welcoming, there is some gender bias she faces while interacting with various bodies/entities. “When we have meetings with certain kinds of entities, they expect or they would appreciate a male to represent the company. Thankfully, I do have a co-founder who usually steps in during such occasions. But I think on those occasions if it was just me, it would have been a little more inconvenient to crack the meetings.”
Women like Jaggi, despite varied experiences, face such a challenge. Meanwhile, as per Boston Consulting Group, startups founded or co-founded by women can generate 10 percent more cumulative revenue over a five-year period. This is largely because the startups have a more inclusive work culture and employ three times more women than men. Diversity in any form is expected to help growth.
Meanwhile, Nidhi Pant, co-founder of S4S Technologies has faced more than a few hurdles. “When I started off, I was not taken seriously because I was straight out of college, I was very young and also a woman. So many people assumed that this was either my husband's business or my father's business. So, they assumed this was a part-time stint for me — as I was in the food domain.” While the beginning of the journey was a challenge, there has been some shift. Today, S4S — a near-farm gate food processing platform — is working with over 2,700 women farmers and serving over a million customers.
Goa-based Sucheta Bhandare, who launched Earth Poorna in 2019, works with close to 100 farmers with the support of nonprofits and FPOs. Her company, which is into healthy snacks, procures millets from farmers and sells the millets after value addition to end customers. “When we say farmers, we usually associate the role with a male farmer. However, women are active in farms today. Usually, small farms are run by women who have small parcels of land and also may own cattle.”
Over years, the fall in farm income has pushed many farmers out of farms, so convincing them back to farms to cultivate millets was a challenge, says Bhandare. “But these women farmers realised my vision of not just keeping the old tradition alive of millet cultivation, but improving farmers' income.” Bhandare — who is a daughter of a farmer herself — believes gaining the trust of farmers is very critical for any startup in the space.
It is estimated that the agriculture sector employs 80 percent of all economically active women; they comprise 33 percent of the agricultural labour force and 48 percent of self-employed farmers.
With the rapid expansion of agri-tech in the next few years, the income of rural India is expected to improve further. Thus, the contribution of women entrepreneurs is expected to rise too.
RuKart is a Mumbai-based agri-tech startup that is empowering women with its technology solutions. Around 70 percent of their customers are women. "We are focusing on women entrepreneurs/change agents for the last-mile delivery of our technology. Currently, we are working with Sakhi Unique Rural Enterprise (SURE) which is a network of women entrepreneurs in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. They are the change agents as well as technology suppliers to the last mile customers," said Sharayu S Kulkarni, co-founder of RuKart.
She further stated women are taking charge mainly of the health & fitness industry, cosmetics & education today. "Now, women are also stepping into the agri-tech space with more focus on empowering women farmers/micro-entrepreneurs with technology."
This focus will help create more opportunities for women by women in agriculture and allied sectors. Such opportunities for women will help improve livelihood in rural India.
