On a chilly December morning, a group of women wrapped in colorful saris, warm scarves and woolen caps huddled outside a three-story building in a busy Delhi neighborhood.
Within the walls of the building was a unit of one of the oldest social enterprises in India, owned and led by women.
The cooperative – now called Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad – was started in 1959 in Mumbai (then Bombay) by seven housewives who made the humble papad or poppadome, a crunchy, salty snack that is a staple of Indian meals.
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 16bn rupees ($186m; £150m) and exports products to countries including the UK and the US.
Working mostly from home, the women in this cooperative produce items including detergents, spices and chapatis (flatbreads), but their most popular product is the poppadom brand Lijjat.
“Lijjat is a temple for us. It helps us earn money and feed our families,” says Lakshmi, 70, who runs a center in Delhi.
Ms. Lakshmi, who uses only one name, joined the cooperative about four decades ago after her husband died, forcing her to look for work.
“I didn’t finish my studies and I didn’t know what else to do. Then my neighbor told me about Lijjat,” she says.
The decision to join the women’s cooperative changed her life, she says. Now she leads 150 women in the center.
For women like Ms. Lakshmi, the cooperative offers an opportunity to earn a decent income while balancing their work at home.
Every morning, the members take a bus hired by the cooperative to the nearest Lijjat center. There, they collect their share of the pre-mixed dough made from lentils and spices, which they take home to roll into poppadoms.
“I went home with this dough and did all my household chores, fed the children and sat by the chakla [a flat wooden board] and white [rolling pin] in the afternoon to make small round thin papads,” says Mrs. Lakshmi.
Initially, it took her four to five hours to make 1 kg of dry papad lentils, but she says she can now 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 across the country.
After the women make and dry the poppadoms at home, they are returned to the center for packaging. Lijjat’s distribution network then transports the products to retail stores.
The company has come a long way since its establishment.
In the 1950s, newly independent India focused on reconstruction, trying to strike a balance between promoting small, rural industries and pushing large urban factories.
It was also a time when the government owned most of the factories in the country. Life for women was a particular challenge as they had to negotiate a deeply conservative and patriarchal society in order to get an education and work.
The group of women who founded Lijjat – Jaswantiben Jamnadas Poppat, Parvatiben Ramdas Thodani, Ujamben Narandas Kundalia, Banuben N Tanna, Labugen Amritlal Gokani, Jayaben V Vithalani and Diwaliben Lukka – were in their 20s and 30s, living in a crowded apartment building in Mumbai and looking for ways to support their families.
Their idea was simple – to work from home and earn money using the cooking skills passed down to them by generations of women.
But they had no money to buy the ingredients and sought financial help from Chhaganlal Karamshi Parekh, a social worker.
He offered them a loan of 80 rupees ($0.93; £0.75 at today’s exchange rate), which at the time was enough to get them started.
But the women soon realized that no one would accept them. Narrating the story, Swati Paradkar, the current president of the cooperative, says the women had to return to Parekh for help.
He again lent them 80 rupees, but this time on the condition that they would pay him back 200 rupees. Parekh – whom the women called Bappa (meaning father) – and other social workers took the poppadoms to local merchants, who agreed to keep them in stock 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 a day and gradually poppadoms became very popular,” says Ms. Paradkar.
As the business grew, more and more women joined the cooperative—not as employees, but as co-owners with decision-making influence. Women call each other ben or sister in Gujarati.
“We are like a cooperative, not a company. Although 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,” says Mrs. Paradkar. – I think that is the secret of our success.
For decades, the cooperative produced its poppadoms without the legendary Lijjat brand name.
In 1966, the Khadi Development and Village Industries Commission, a government organization for the promotion of small rural industries, suggested that they come up with a brand.
The cooperative placed an ad in the newspaper asking for proposals. “We received a lot of inputs, but one of our sisters suggested Lajjat. We changed it to 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 educated my children, built a house and married them,” says Ms. Lakshmi.
“Working here, I found not only income, but also respect.”
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