How a homemade snack brand has empowered thousands of women in India

On a cold December morning, a group of women wearing colorful saris, warm shawls and wool hats gathered outside a three-storey building in a busy neighborhood in Delhi.

Within the building's walls was a unit of one of India's oldest social enterprises, owned and run by women.

The cooperative — now called Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad — was founded in 1959 in Mumbai (then Bombay) by seven housewives who made the humble papad or poppadum, a crunchy, delicious snack that is a staple of Indian meals.

Sixty-five years later, the cooperative – headquartered in Mumbai – has spread throughout India and has more than 45,000 women members. It has an annual turnover of 16 billion rupees ($186 million; £150 million) and exports products to countries including the UK and the US.

The women in this cooperative work mostly from home, producing items including detergents, spices and flatbreads, but their most popular product is the Lijjat brand of poppadom.

“Lughat is a temple for us,” says Lakshmi, 70, who runs the Delhi centre. “It helps us earn money and feed our families.”

Lakshmi, who uses only one name, joined the cooperative about four decades ago after her husband died, forcing her to look for work.

“I had not finished my studies and did not know what to do,” she says. “Then my neighbor told me about Lajat.”

She says that the decision to join the women's cooperative changed her life. She now manages 150 women at the centre.

For women like Lakshmi, the cooperative provides an opportunity to earn a decent income while balancing their work at home.

Every morning, the members take a bus chartered by the cooperative to the nearest Lajat centre. There, they collect their share of pre-mixed dough made with lentils and spices, take it home and roll it into poppadoms.

“I would come home with this dough and do all my household chores, feed my children and sit with the chakla (flat wooden board) and palan (rolling pin) in the afternoon to make small, thin, round pads,” says Ms. Lakshmi. .

Initially, it took four and five hours to make one kilogram of dried lentil papad, but she says she can now produce this amount in just half an hour.

The head office in Mumbai procures raw materials like lentils, spices and oil in bulk, mixes the flour and sends it to Lajjat ​​offices across the country.

Once the women make and dry the poppadum at home, they deliver it back to the center for packaging. Lijat's distribution network then transports the products to retail stores.

The company has come a long way since its founding.

In the 1950s, newly independent India was focusing on rebuilding itself, trying to strike a balance between encouraging small-scale rural industries and pushing for the creation of large urban factories.

This was also a time when the government owned most of the factories in the country. Women's lives were particularly difficult because they had to negotiate a highly conservative and patriarchal society to obtain education and work.

The group of women who founded the jat – Jaswantiben Jamnadas Popat, Parvathiben Ramdas Thodani, Ogamben Narandas Kondalia, Panuben N Tanna, Lagoben Amritlal Gokani, Jayaben V Vithalani and Dewaliben Loka – were in their 20s and 30s, living in a crowded tenement in Mumbai and looking for ways to To support their families.

Their idea was simple – work from home and earn money using cooking skills passed down to them through generations of women.

But they did not have money to buy ingredients and sought financial help from social worker Chhaganlal Karamshi Parekh.

He offered them a loan of 80 rupees ($0.93; £0.75 at today's prices), which was enough to get started at the time.

But the women soon realized that there was no one to buy the poppadom. Narrating the story, Swati Paradkar, the current president of the cooperative, says the women had to return to Parekh to get help.

He again lent them 80 rupees, but this time on the condition that they repay him 200 rupees. Parekh – whom the women called “Papa” – and other social workers took the poppadom pills to local shopkeepers, who agreed to stock them only if they could pay after the products were sold.

Only one shopkeeper agreed to pay the women immediately. “He started by buying four to six packets a day, and gradually poppadoms became very popular,” says Ms. Paradkar.

As the business grew, more women joined the cooperative – not as employees, but as co-owners with a say in decision-making. Women calling each other son Or sister in Gujarati.

“We are like a cooperative, not a company,” says Ms. Paradkar. “Even though I am the president, I am not the owner. We are all co-owners and have equal rights. We all share profits and even losses.” “I think that's the secret of our success.”

For decades, the cooperative has produced its own poppadums without the famous Jat brand name.

In 1966, the Khadi and Village Industries Development Commission, a government organization for promoting small rural industries, suggested that they come up with a brand name.

The cooperative placed an advertisement in newspapers asking for suggestions. “We received a lot of entries, but one of our sisters suggested ‘Lagaat’. We modified it to ‘Lagaat’, which means taste in Gujarati,” says Ms Paradkar.

Over the decades, the cooperative has allowed generations of women to achieve financial independence.

“Today I enrolled my children in school, built a house and married them off,” Ms. Lakshmi says.

“By working here, I was able to earn not only an income, but also respect.”

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