The fast track to change

Ela Bhatt, the 77-year-old lawyer who founded SEWA in her native Ahmedadad in 1972, remembers the dismissive response when she tried to certify the union. “You are a rag-tag bunch,’’ she said authorities told her. How could she hope to organize women who were poor, illiterate, and had addresses like “the third shed from the municipal water tap’’? Some of the women didn’t even have last names.

Bhatt was in Cambridge recently to receive the Radcliffe Institute medal. In an interview, she said working with the kind of people society considers “marginal’’ can be a fast track to change. “Margins are fertile ground,’’ she said. “Edges are dynamic areas where there is room for growth.’’ It is on the fringes that change often begins, migrating eventually to the mainstream. The Tunisian fruit vendor whose suicide catalyzed the Arab Spring uprisings, she noted, was also member of the “marginal’’ economy.

Besides, she said, “in India the margins are wide.’’ She estimates that self-employed workers account for 62 percent of India’s GDP.

Bhatt recalled her youth as an idealistic law student, just a few years after India gained its independence. It was a heady time. Mahatma Gandhi’s example of nonviolent revolution was still fresh. “What pricked me always from the inside was injustice, she said. “I saw with my eyes the thousands of people working in economic activities where there were no employer-employee relationships. Why does the minimum wage not apply to them?’’

She became a lawyer for the Textile Labor Association, and convinced the union to accept a group of self-employed women cart-pullers who worked in the local cloth market. But it was an uneasy fit, and eventually SEWA became independent. “What is work? It defies categories,’’ she said. “The poor are of course workers, or they would not survive.’’