Women in India face a jobs crisis. Are factories the solution?
But with her husband gone, eliminating his wages as a server, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a city about 100 miles north of Mumbai. A dozen years later, she is still there, plucking newly molded food storage containers and other household implements off a conveyor belt, labeling them and placing them in cartons bound for kitchens as far away as Los Angeles and London.
Pawar earns about 12,000 rupees per month (about $150), a meager sum by global standards. Yet those wages have allowed her to keep her daughter in high school while transforming their everyday lives.
She purchased a refrigerator. Suddenly, she could buy vegetables in larger quantities, limiting her trips to the market and giving her more power to bargain for better prices. She added a stove powered by propane — liberation from the wood fire that filled her home with smoke, and an escape from the tedious work of scouring the ground for branches to set alight.
Above all, Pawar, 36, described horizons that had expanded.
«When you come out of your house, you see the outside world,» she said. «You see the possibilities, and I feel that we can make progress.»
As international brands limit their dependence on China by shifting some manufacturing to India, the trend holds the potential to generate significant numbers of manufacturing jobs — especially for women, who have largely been excluded from the ranks of formal Indian employment.
«There is a huge reserve
