Women’s collectives driving India’s next phase of growth

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Women’s collectives driving India’s next phase of growth

by Sonal Jaitly
Jan 20, 2026
4 min

At MSC, we see women’s collectives transforming small opportunities into sustainable enterprises, strengthening livelihoods, local markets, and rural economies through collective action, access to finance, and supportive public systems.

Across rural India, women are redrawing the map of local economies. What begins as an attempt to survive scarcity often evolves into innovation that not only sustains households but creates new markets. These are not the unicorns of urban India, but enterprises built from goats, grains and solar panels; ventures that generate income, empower communities, and weave new circuits of demand and supply. This shift rests on one of the world’s largest social and financial inclusion platforms, an infrastructure of women’s collectives unmatched in scale across the developing world.

In Bihar’s Gaya district, for instance, Santra Devi, a widow with no land, accessed a government scheme to build a goat shed and bought a few animals through her self-help group (SHG). Within a year, she was selling livestock, leasing land, cultivating pigeon peas and purchasing a year’s ration for her family. What appears modest is, in fact, transformative: A woman once dependent on others had secured her livelihood and added a steady stream of goats, grain and fodder into the village economy.

Such stories are becoming more common as India has spent nearly three decades building an unparalleled architecture for women’s livelihoods. Under the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM), over 10 crore women—a population roughly the size of Japan— have been mobilised into 90.90 lakh SHGs. This mobilisation represents a unique success: collectivisation of rural women at an unprecedented scale, backed by formal credit, training and structured pathways to enterprise. These groups have evolved from savings circles into engines of enterprise, enabling women’s access to credit, skills and markets. They are also becoming market intermediaries—pooling produce, negotiating with buyers and linking village enterprises to procurement systems.

Today, the SHG ecosystem spans 21 clusters and 8–11 key value chains (from agriculture, livestock, textiles and handicrafts.) State Rural Livelihood Missions have further aggregated these collectives into 6–7 emerging national brands, helping SHG enterprises move beyond local markets. This foundation has enabled the second leap: the rise of women-run micro-enterprises that are beginning to reshape local markets and participate in value chains with growing sophistication.

Livestock rearing, food processing, retail and local services sit at the heart of this transition. Goats and poultry offer low-entry pathways for women who, until recently, had virtually no productive assets and minimal access to formal banking. Over the past two decades, this has shifted dramatically. Under DAY-NRLM, banks have disbursed over ₹11 lakh crore in credit to women’s SHGs, enabling group loans, first-time asset ownership and working capital for micro-enterprises. Independent impact evaluations across nine states show incomes rising by around 19%, savings increasing by nearly 28% and dependence on informal moneylenders dropping by 20 percentage points—clear evidence that women are moving from subsistence to steady enterprise.

With infrastructure such as MGNREGA-funded sheds and seed capital from state schemes like Bihar’s Satat Jeevikoparjan Yojana, many women have formalised and expanded their ventures. Similar transitions are visible in dairy, where women—who make up nearly 70% of India’s dairy workforce—supply to cooperatives such as Amul, linking household production to national-scale markets. The next opportunity lies in connecting these enterprises to wider markets through digital tools, e-commerce channels and transparent procurement systems.

What binds these diverse models together is sheer intent. Women innovate by combining what is available—a government wage scheme, a collective loan, a leased plot, a training programme—into a sequence that yields surplus. That surplus is reinvested. Earnings from one activity financing the next, savings cycles strengthening household resilience and steady cashflows enabling investments in nutrition, education and mobility. Scarcity becomes the raw material of creativity.

While there are some challenges—from uneven market access to weak last-mile services and women shouldering a disproportionate share of unpaid care work that constrains how much time women can invest in enterprise. Yet, where enabling ecosystems exist, the gains are unmistakable. A World Bank review of NRLM programmes shows improvements in women’s agency, participation in household decisions and measurable increases in income from diversified micro-enterprises.

The lesson is clear. Organising as groups shifts the starting point, giving women collective strength no individual enterprise can achieve alone. Access to group loans and working capital enables asset creation and income diversification. And small, strategic investments in infrastructure, training and procurement linkages turn necessity-oriented enterprises into opportunity and growth-oriented ventures.

India’s SHG ecosystem demonstrates that inclusive growth starts at the grassroots. Local women entrepreneurs collectivised in a group have become a driving force for women led rural transformation. To unlock their full potential, policymakers must invest in digital access, infrastructure, and fair procurement systems. With the right support, these groups can lead the next wave of rural prosperity.

This was published in “The Hindustan times” on 20th January 2026.