- Lived:
- 7 September 1933, Ahmedabad – 2 November 2022, Ahmedabad; schooled in Surat, but the life's work was done almost entirely in one Gujarati city and the villages around it
- Field:
- labour organising — Gandhian trade unionism carried into the informal economy; founder of SEWA, the Self-Employed Women's Association
- The Big Idea:
- The woman carrying a head-load through the cloth market and the woman rolling bidis on her doorstep are workers — and workers deserve a union, a bank, insurance and a name, even when no employer will admit to employing them.
- In their words:
- "We are poor, but so many" — the sentence she heard from SEWA's own members, and chose as the title of her book
- If you remember one thing:
- When the law said a union must have an employer to fight, a soft-spoken lawyer answered that a union exists for its workers, not against anyone — and then spent fifty years building, for the poorest working women in India, everything the formal economy had refused them.