How a homemade snack brand empowered thousands of women in India

On a cold December morning, a group of women wrapped in colorful saris, warm shawls and woolen hats huddled outside a three-story building in a busy Delhi neighborhood.

Within the walls of the building ran 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 created in 1959 in Mumbai (then Bombay) by seven housewives who made the humble papad or poppadoms, a crunchy and salty snack that is a staple of Indian dishes.

Sixty-five years later, the cooperative – headquartered in Mumbai – has spread across India with 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 United Kingdom and the United States.

Working mostly from home, the women in this cooperative produce items including detergents, spices and chapatis (flatbreads), but their most loved product is the Lijjat brand of poppadoms.

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

Ms. Lakshmi, who uses only one name, joined the cooperative about four decades ago after the death of her husband, which forced her to look for work.

“I hadn’t finished my studies and I didn’t know what else to do. That’s when my neighbor told me about Lijjat,” he says.

The decision to join the women’s cooperative transformed her life, she says. She now manages 150 women at the center.

For women like Ms. Lakshmi, the cooperative offers a chance to earn a decent income while balancing her work at home.

Every morning, women members take a bus hired by the cooperative to the nearest Lijjat center. Here, they collect their share of pre-mixed dough made with lentils and spices, which they take home to roll into poppadoms.

“I had to go home with this dough and do all my homework, feed my children and sit with my chakla (a flat wooden board) and a belan (roller) in the afternoon to make small round thin papads ,” says Ms. Lakshmi. .

Initially, it took four to five hours to make 1 kg of dried lentil papa, but she says that now she can produce that amount in just half an hour.

The head office in Mumbai buys raw materials like lentils, spices and oil in bulk, mixes the flour and sends it to Lijjat’s offices around the country.

Once the women make and dry the poppadoms at home, they send them back to the center for packaging. Lijjat’s network of distributors then transports the products to the shops.

The company has come a long way since its foundation.

In the 1950s, a newly independent India focused on reconstruction itself, trying to find a balance between the promotion of small-scale rural industry and the push for large urban factories.

It was also a time when the government owned most of the factories in the country. Life for women was especially challenging as they had to negotiate a deeply conservative and patriarchal society in order to be educated and work.

The group of women who founded Lijjat – Jaswantiben Jamnadas Poppat, Parvatiben Ramdas Thodani, Ujamben Narandas Kundalia, Banuben N Tanna, Laguben Amritlal Gokani, Jayaben V Vithalani and Diwaliben Lukka – were in their 20s and 30s, living in a crowded place and Mumbai. they are looking for ways to support their families.

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

But they had no money to buy ingredients and sought financial assistance from Chhaganlal Karamshi Parekh, a social worker.

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

But the women soon realized that there were no takers for their poppadoms. Narrating the story, Swati Paradkar, the current president of the cooperative, says the women have to turn to Parekh for help.

He lent them 80 rupees again, but this time on the condition that they return 200 rupees. Parekh – whom the women call Bappa (meaning father) – and other social workers took the poppadoms to local traders, who agreed to stock them only if they could pay after the products were sold.

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

As the business grows, more women join the cooperative—not as employees, but as co-owners with a say in decision-making. Women call each other well or sister in Gujarati.

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

For decades, the cooperative has produced its poppadoms without the iconic Lijjat brand.

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

The cooperative placed an ad in the newspapers asking for suggestions. “We received a lot of entries, but one of our sisters suggested Lajjat. We added Lijjat, which means taste in Gujarati,” says Ms Paradkar.

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

“Today I have taken my children to school, built a house and married them,” says Ms. Lakshmi.

“Working here, I found not only an income, but respect.”

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