Introduction

The pursuit of economic justice for women, along with their right to access, control, and benefit from financial resources and decision-making, is central to achieving gender equality and inclusive development. UN Women defines women’s economic empowerment as equal participation in decent work, access to markets and social protection, control over resources and time, and decision-making authority over economic matters at all levels.^[1] These are preconditions for systemic transformation and align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth), and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities).^[2] In India, these commitments remain aspirational.

This paper concerns itself with not only women’s entry into the workforce, but whether they can exercise power, claim space, and participate as decision-makers in urban markets. It focuses on the structural and institutional barriers to women’s economic integration, and argues that India’s women’s entrepreneurship framework prioritises symbolic inclusion and compliance-readiness over genuine stakeholdership, leaving women formally recognised but structurally excluded from urban markets.

This argument must be understood within a policy context where urban livelihoods and employment frameworks are undergoing a transition. Flagship programmes, such as the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Antyodaya Yojana-National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM), have witnessed declining budgetary allocations in recent Union Budgets,^[3] while mission-mode initiatives, including the Smart Cities Mission, are in the process of winding down.^[4] There is no urban equivalent of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA), now remodelled as Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission-Gramin Act (VB-G RAM G Act), which guarantees employment and stable income pathways for informal workers in cities.^[5] Consequently, women’s growing reliance on self-employment and microenterprise reflects the lack of secure, rights-based urban livelihood alternatives, rather than entrepreneurial aspirations.

Self-employment schemes rarely examine women’s agency to scale their businesses, a concern supported by labour force data and scheme monitoring frameworks discussed later in the paper. Neoliberal frameworks that promote individual entrepreneurship often dilute the State’s role, reduces public provisioning, and overlooks the structural burden of unpaid care work borne by women.^[6],[7] Government schemes tend to frame women entrepreneurship as “empowerment” and obscures the systemic limitations women face, and this hinders women’s equitable participation in urban economies.^[8] This structural undervaluation limits women’s capacity to take market risks or expand their enterprises.^[9]

Urban marketplaces are not merely sites of economic interaction. Whether physical, online, or part of the gig economy, they are contested terrains and deeply gendered geographies shaped by visibility, ownership, and stakeholdership.^[10] Although increasingly visible in Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) data, women remain largely absent from these commercial landscapes as decision-makers or claimants.^[a],[11] Field observations from market committees and trade associations in Bengaluru, Delhi, Kozhikode, and Thiruvananthapuram indicate negligible representation of women, despite their presence as vendors.

Drawing on literature on urban informality, this paper treats women’s economic exclusion as an outcome of planning norms, market regulations, and institutional gatekeeping. While it uses the category of ‘women’ for a macro-level policy argument, existing scholarship shows that caste, religion, and migrant status further shape women’s access to urban markets and mobility. Income, flexibility, and strategic interest linked to power, autonomy, and recognition shape gendered economic participation within these marketplaces.^[12] Graded access to urban spaces, mobility, and institutional membership further compound these exclusions for women from Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim communities.^[13] The paper acknowledges these layered exclusions while focusing on the broader institutional mechanisms that constrain women’s economic integration.

Current policies focus on credit access, digitisation, or business registration.^[14] However, policymakers often overlook spatial infrastructure (restrictive zoning laws, high rents, safety concerns, and the absence of inclusive infrastructure), as well as social barriers. The assessment relies on scheme guidelines and monitoring frameworks that prioritise disbursement and registration indicators, but do not establish mechanisms for buyer access, supply chain participation, or post-entry support.

The November 2025 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and UN Women signals institutional recognition of gender-responsive procurement.^[15] GeM provides training, implements global best practices, sensitises government buyers, and facilitates partnerships to strengthen product readiness and market linkages for women suppliers. Despite these gender-responsive efforts under the MoU to diversify procurement and improve participation, public procurement data shows that women-led Medium and Small Enterprises (MSEs) still capture limited value.^[16] Structural barriers, such as eligibility criteria, turnover thresholds, tender complexity, and limited post-award support, curb genuine economic integration.

These insights are critical in evaluating Indian statistics and global indices, such as India’s rise in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index (until its discontinuation in 2020).^[17] The Doing Business Report treated the market as neutral terrain, considering metrics such as starting a business, obtaining permits, and trading across borders, without reflecting on the barriers women entrepreneurs face in accessing urban spaces and supply chains, including caste and various other factors.

Policies and initiatives also encourage women to shift to digital modes, selling through diverse social media platforms or government portals, assuming a base level of access to infrastructure, technological familiarity, and control over business decisions that many women do not possess.^[18] Without enabling ecosystems including language, affordability, and socio-cultural freedom, digital platforms risk reinforcing exclusion rather than enabling empowerment.^[19] These assumptions flatten the lived realities of women, fostering a policy environment in which they are included only in a symbolic and not substantive manner.^[20]

Evidence from labour force surveys, procurement data, and field observations suggests that women’s growing participation in self-employment and platform-mediated work is often shaped by constrained labour markets, care responsibilities, and spatial exclusion. For example, India’s Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) shows a steady rise in self-employment among urban women, suggesting a shift from secure employment into informal, home-based self-employment, which coincides with a decline in regular salaried jobs.^[21] Recent labour codes, through expanded contractualisation and fixed-term employment, have raised concerns about weaker employment security,^[22] intensifying women’s reliance on self-employment and microenterprise as a survival strategy rather than entrepreneurial choice.

Still a vast majority of women are confined within the domestic sphere out of compulsion and not out of preference. Working from home does not guarantee autonomy and may compound the burden of unpaid domestic labour.^[23],[24] Their mobility is structurally restricted by caregiving roles, safety concerns and a lack of infrastructure, with significant spatial consequences.^[25] Without access to a dedicated workspace, women often perform income-generating tasks amid constant interruption and negotiation, inhibiting their productivity and scalability.^[26] These women may achieve digital or home-based visibility, but access to infrastructure, spatial security, the ability to hire, navigate zoning regulations, and gain representation in trader associations and decision-making remains elusive for them.^[27]

Thus, the mere presence of women in a domain does not necessarily reflect their sense of belonging or how they perceive themselves in relation to that space. There is a need to rethink urban economic policy and planning, from one that prioritises capital and infrastructure to another that recognises markets as a site of power, socially produced, and contested in their layout, access, and governance.^[28] Building on this conceptual framework, the following section examines how current policy initiatives can translate women’s visibility and enterprise registration into genuine market integration.

Government Initiatives for Women Entrepreneurs

Over the past decade, various ministries, financial institutions, and startup missions have introduced schemes to provide credit guarantees, skill development, capacity building, digital onboarding, and access to procurement, aiming to promote women’s entrepreneurship in India.^[29] Additionally, the share of the Gender budget has increased to 8.86 percent of the total Financial Year (FY) 2025-26 budget from 6.8 percent in FY 2024-25.^[30] While these schemes have expanded women’s entry into self-employment, their capacity to enable market integration and economic security remains limited. The Ministry of MSMEs has increased the credit guarantee cover and launched schemes for first-time women entrepreneurs. The Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme (PMEGP), the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana (PMMY), PM Street Vendor’s Atma Nirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi), and the Ministry of Labour have also revised their ambit to include gig workers. However, a closer look at government allocations and schemes highlights both achievements and structural gaps. Table 1 shows the financial allocation for women-oriented initiatives under the Union Budget 2025-26.

Table 1: Financial Allocation for Women-Oriented Initiatives (Union Budget 2025-26)

Category	FY 2024-25	FY 2025-26
Gender Budget	· 6.8 percent of the total budget	· 8.86 percent of the total budget
Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises	· Revised Estimate: INR 173.06 billion	· Outlay: INR 231.68 billion · Turnover limits for classification increased. · Credit guarantees for micro and small enterprises increased to INR 100 million[31]
New Scheme for First-time Women Entrepreneurs	· Not present	· Term loans up to INR 20 million for 500,000 women till FY 2030-31[32]
Customised Credit Cards for Micro Enterprises	· Not present	· 1 million cards, with a credit limit of INR 500,000 each, to be issued in the first year
PMMY loan limit for Women	· INR 1 million under the ‘Tarun’ category	· INR 2 million for eligible women entrepreneurs[33]
Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana – National Urban Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NULM)	· Revised Estimate INR 300 million from a Budget Estimate of INR 3 billion	· Mission concluded in 2024.[34]
PM SVANidhi	· Revised Estimate INR 4.50 billion · Loan support for street vendors, micro credit, issuance of identity cards, and Certificate of Vending (CoV) by ULBs	· INR 3.73 billion · Higher loan limits, UPI-linked credit cards with INR 30,000 limit and capacity-building support; 25 percent lending target for women.[35]
Ministry of Labour and Employment	· Revised Estimate of INR 183 billion	· INR 326.46 billion, recognising ‘gig work,’ ‘platform workers’ and ‘aggregators.’[36]

Source: Authors’ own

Despite DAY-NULM’s achievements, including mobilising more than 10 million women from vulnerable communities into 996,000 self-help groups (SHGs) and creating 3.93 million livelihoods through skill training and subsidised credit for micro-enterprise development, the government concluded the scheme in 2024.^[37] Its successor, Deendayal Jan Ajeevika Yojana, is still limited to 25 cities as a ‘test-learn-scale’ pilot project with an outlay of INR 1.80 billion.^[38]

All the other women-oriented government initiatives and schemes, including PMEGP, PMMY, Stand-Up India, PM SVANidhi, Startup India, and the GeM,^[39] facilitate women’s entry into the marketplace. These schemes treat registration, onboarding, and digital visibility as indicators of empowerment, without addressing the non-negotiable questions of ownership, supply chains, spatial infrastructure, and legal recognition that are essential to women’s integration into urban market systems.^[40] Table 2 highlights the structural gaps in government schemes that support women entrepreneurs.

Table 2. Schemes Supporting Women Entrepreneurs 

Schemes	Support Offered	Structural Gaps
Startup India	· Recognition, expos, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) listing, incubator networks[41]	· No access to city markets or supply chains
Stand-Up India	· Bank Loans between INR 1 million and INR 10 million for scheduled castes/scheduled tribes and women-led projects via Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), no new expansion announced[42]	· Excludes unregistered and businesses · Eligibility barriers (greenfield, SC/ST criteria) · Low uptake and high rejection rates
PMEGP	· Credit-linked subsidy for establishing micro-enterprises in the non-farm sector  · Women and other special category beneficiaries receive a higher margin money subsidy of 25 percent of the project cost in urban areas[43]	· No trade integration or mentoring · Loan-linked subsidy · Patchy bank compliance · Minimal post-disbursal support
PMMY	· Loans up to INR 1 million to the non-corporate, non-farm small/micro enterprises.	·       Lacks linkages to procurement or vendor platforms ·       High dependence on bank discretion ·       Limited credit for women without collateral
PM SVANidhi	· UPI-linked loans for vendors[44] · 45 percent of all loans have gone to women vendors (75 percent from vulnerable communities)[45] · SVANidhi se Samriddhi enables borrowers to access social security schemes	· Does not guarantee spatial rights, resolve tenure, recognition or association entry, supply chain entry
NITI Aayog’s Women Entrepreneurship Programme (WEP)	· Online platform, mentoring, awards, financial support[46]	· Symbolic visibility without any structural inclusion
Mahila Udyam Nidhi Yojana	· Provides financial assistance up to INR 1 million to start small businesses[47]	· No built-in mechanism to connect women-led enterprises to urban markets or retail hubs
GeM	· Procurement Platform	· Stringent eligibility filters out most women entrepreneurs
Trade-Related Entrepreneurship Assistance and Development (TREAD) Scheme	· Financial assistance and training support, focusing on promoting self-employment and income generation activities for women, particularly in the non-farm sector[48]	· Dependent on NGO for facilitation, lacks direct access for women, focuses on credit delivery, not integration. · Document-heavy for informal businesses and first-time entrepreneurs

Source: Authors’ own

Schemes like Startup India and Stand-Up India require recognition certificates from DPIIT, which typically include Startup India-recognised private limited companies, registered partnerships, or limited liability partnership companies incorporated within the last 10 years, having an annual turnover of less than INR 1 billion with an innovative and scalable model.^[49] Thus, these schemes, by design, exclude a large number of unregistered, informal women-led enterprises. Such stringent eligibility requirements explain the high rejection rate in Stand-Up India, as many women-led concerns cannot meet its greenfield project requirements and other criteria.^[50]

Although PM SVANidhi attempts to formalise vending in cities and extend social protection to vendors, it does not support their spatial or institutional rights, which are crucial for preventing ad-hoc evictions.^[51] The scheme provides loans and a unified payments interface (UPI)-linked credit for street vendors (25 percent earmarked for women), but does not guarantee tenure, access to vendor associations, or integration into procurement systems. Likewise, NITI Aayog’s Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) focuses on visibility, award and mentoring, with no structural guarantees of supply chain or market inclusion.^[52]

While these schemes expand women’s entry into entrepreneurship, their monitoring frameworks prioritise beneficiary counts and credit disbursements over critical post-loan outcomes, such as enterprise sustainability, repeated market participation, income stability, and growth trajectories. Taken together, these schemes position women’s entrepreneurship as an entry-level intervention rather than a pathway to secure their economic participation.

Contradictory Outcomes and Persistent Gaps

India scored 0.64 in the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Gender Gap Index 2024—significantly below the global average of 0.685.^[53] The disparity is starker in the WEF’s Economic Participation and Opportunity sub-index, with India’s score at 0.407 on a 0-1 scale, ranking it 144th globally.^[54] These indicators contrast with the narrative of growth in women’s entrepreneurship, often depicted in government statistics, which usually blur the more substantive aspects of integration by merely highlighting an increase in “registered” women’s enterprises.^[55] Bridging these structural and institutional gaps is essential to advancing women’s entrepreneurship by enabling aspiring entrepreneurs to scale their ventures, achieve greater stability and autonomy, and access the city as a space where they can belong and exercise agency.

Procurement and Supply Chain Access 

Public procurement is a key policy instrument for integrating MSEs into formal markets and enabling growth. India’s public procurement policy for MSEs, notified in 2012 and updated in 2022, mandates that 25 percent of procurement by all central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) and government departments must be from MSEs (including 3 percent from women-owned enterprises). In principle, such mandates recognise procurement as a pathway to market access and revenue stability for historically excluded producers. In practice, however, access to public procurement is structured through compliance-heavy institutionalised architectures that privilege already formalised enterprises. In FY 2024-25, CPSEs and departments procured goods worth INR 3.72 million (38.39 percent) primarily from formalised units, rather than women-led informal enterprises, due to a lack of awareness of procurement channels, credit history, and other onboarding processes.^[56]

The government introduced GeM and initiatives such as Direct Purchase,^[b] L1 Price Negotiation Mode,^[c] Startups, Women and Youth Advantage Through e-Transactions (SWAYATT),^[d] and Womaniya^[e] to increase women’s participation in trade.^[57] It has also expanded digital access to government buyers. Despite these efforts, expanded vendor onboarding support for women-led enterprises focuses on platform entry, not on integration into the urban procurement and supply chain ecosystem. GeM’s onboarding process requires formal compliance prerequisites, including Goods and Services Tax (GST) registration, Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) certification, proof of annual turnover, digital documentation, transaction charges and audited financials, as well as active, profitable women-led informal enterprises.^[58] The Womaniya initiative, too, introduced a 3 percent procurement quota for women-led MSEs, a ‘women entrepreneur’ catalogue icon, with reduced transaction charges and dedicated promotion of women-owned products, but with the same onboarding conditions.^[59] Thus, the burden of proof still lies with women to demonstrate compliance, and the structural misalignment between procurement rules and informal enterprises remains unaddressed.^[60]

Figure 1: Women-Led MSE Participation in Public Procurement (GeM, FY24-25)

Source: Authors’ own, using data from the Ministry of Commerce, government of India.^[61]  

While women-led MSEs constitute a growing share of registered enterprises nationally, GeM’s performance data reveals that the intended procurement outcomes have yet to translate into integration. Women-led MSEs make up only eight percent of GeM’s total registered sellers (Figure 1). In FY 2024-25, women-owned enterprises secured INR 466.15 billion in orders, which constitutes a mere 0.9 percent of the INR 5 trillion Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).^[62] These participation metrics determine a firm’s ability to scale, reinvest, and gain bargaining power within the supply chains. When assessed against the mandated 3 percent procurement target for women-owned enterprises, the gap between policy intent and substantive economic integration becomes evident. These exclusions are standard in India’s urban economies, where municipal supply contracts, retail distribution, and even Smart City procurements rarely have women-led enterprises in their bidding or vendor identification processes.

Beyond digital procurement platforms, traditional operations in supply chains further limit women’s participation in urban markets. Dominant supply chains operate on informal logics of trust and continuity, often shaped by those who negotiate value, capital thresholds, legacy networks, trust-based trade associations, intermediary networks, and long-standing male-dominated hierarchies, which first-generation women entrepreneurs find difficult to access.^[f],[63] Even when women are formally on-boarded to procurement portals, they consistently encounter invisible trade biases that restrict their participation in high-volume, high-value procurement and global value chains. Rarely considered as competitive bidders for bulk contracts, women sellers are underrepresented in terms of numbers and contract value to scale.^[64] Moreover, the intersection of these procurement-level barriers with urban regulatory frameworks, including licencing, zoning, and compliance norms, also constrains women’s entry into formal commercial spaces.

Participation in the supply chain requires spatial presence, social capital, compliance capacity, and institutional legitimacy. Women, excluded from economic negotiations, are often unable to get a shop licence, a vending certificate, or a commercial space lease. A woman running a home-based business or selling online cannot scale or negotiate without access to city supply networks, storage facilities, vendor recognition, or municipal licences. Without such structural support and reform in digital and physical market governance, women will continue to be marginalised at the peripheries of the supply chains.

Regulatory Barriers to Market Integration

Urban regulatory frameworks governing commercial activity shape who can legitimately access, occupy, and scale within marketplaces. Despite their gender-neutral language,^[65] the legal and regulatory landscape governing urban businesses, particularly the Shops and Establishments Act^[66] and municipal licencing frameworks and zoning regulations, continue to restrict women’s market participation.^[67] Designed around standardised assumptions about fixed commercial premises, formal employer-employee relationships, and demarcated workspace, they often fail to recognise the diverse forms and spaces of work, excluding the home-based units, informal vendors, and self-employment setups.^[68]

The Shops and Establishments Act, enforced by state labour departments,^[69] mandates the registration of shops, stalls, and commercial establishments, as well as the regulation of working hours, employment contracts, and spatial norms. Intended to regulate commercial activity, it presumes male domination and overlooks the agency and needs of women. In several states, the Act restricts women’s working hours, making it difficult for them to manage or supervise businesses in evening bazaars.^[70] Compliance with the Act does not guarantee access to state support, financial inclusion, or social protection. Its provisions also do not account for women as owners or operators who balance paid work with unpaid care responsibilities. Field studies on women entrepreneurs conducted by Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) have found that registration is often treated as a monitoring tool rather than a support mechanism, where state authorities enforce fines or zoning violations rather than facilitating integration into city planning or support schemes.^[71]

The municipal zoning laws and trade licence rules under town planning acts, master plans, or local development authorities often favour large-scale, male-dominated commercial activities, classifying areas as ‘residential’ or ‘non-commercial’ zones, thereby overlooking potential home-based, informal businesses that may operate in these areas.^[72] Vendors are excluded and evicted from the designated ‘commercial zones’, often in temporary spaces, without regard for their sustenance or spatial logic. These spatial classifications tend to favour large-scale, capital-intensive, and male-dominated commercial activities.

Labour Codes and Entrepreneurship 

The labour code reforms sought to reconfigure India’s labour regulatory landscape by consolidating 29 existing laws.^[73] Although intended to simplify compliance and align labour markets with the requirements of the future of work, these reforms have weakened enforceable employment protections for large sections of the workforce, particularly in the urban informal and service sectors, which employ a sizeable number of women. By default, these reforms have shifted the onus for economic security from the state and employers to individuals, compromising sustainable enterprise growth and blurring the lines between workers and entrepreneurs, particularly for women in own-account, home-based, and platform-mediated work.^[74] While policy frames these women as entrepreneurs, access to social security, maternity protection, and collective bargaining is lacking, reinforcing the precarity of women’s place in the markets.

Regulatory exclusions also extend to procurement-linked supply chains and digital market systems. For example, participation in GeM and access to public supply chain contracts mandate licencing under the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), the drug control authority, or Goods and Services Tax (GST), which are mandatory for participation. These complex procedures and digital compliance requirements filter out informal, women-led businesses that lack the institutional support to navigate them. Women are thus excluded from formal vendor recognition, procurement systems, and urban redevelopment negotiations.

Gender-inclusive infrastructure remains peripheral to India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM), which prioritises beautification, surveillance, and mobility, often at the cost of inclusive economic participation. Documented cases illustrate how regulatory enforcement intersects with the redevelopment agenda and reflect on broader regulatory patterns. For instance, in Mumbai’s Dadar Market in 2023, women vendors were evicted during a road-widening project without being offered permanent vending zones or membership in vendor associations.^[75] In May 2025, street vendors in New Delhi, many of whom were beneficiaries of the PM SVANidhi scheme, were evicted during a city-wide Safai Abhiyan (Cleanup Drive).^[76]

Besides exclusion and the threat of eviction, women in marketplaces continue to lack basic amenities and infrastructure like gender-segregated toilets, breastfeeding spaces, and safe resting areas.^[77] Such gaps reinforce women’s peripheral status in market planning. Policies designed for women are often not created by them or with their input. Safety regulations like curfews and restricted working hours meant to “protect” are used for moral surveillance to discipline women’s mobility, determining when and where women are permitted to work. By reinforcing their association with the domestic sphere, these policies overlook the fact that earning a living does not automatically translate to social or financial agency. Women’s autonomy is undermined when they are seen merely as contributors to family needs, limiting their identity to caregivers rather than decision-makers.^[78]

Taken together, these regulatory arrangements operate not through explicit exclusion but through design choices that privilege formal, capital-intensive, and male-dominated modes of enterprises. Without reforms that recognise diverse workplaces, formal enterprise models, and women’s spatial claims within cities, regulatory systems continue to undermine women’s ability to integrate into urban markets.

Informal Sector, MSMEs, and Women’s Entrepreneurship

For women’s economic empowerment, it is crucial to examine the types of employment available, the conditions under which women work, and the broader social and economic context in which they operate, rather than relying solely on participation statistics.  The numeric data does not recognise the informal nature of women’s work, their spatial exclusion, and their structural vulnerability outside urban economies.

For example, the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation shows a steady rise in women’s labour force participation in both Labour Force Participation Rate (LFPR) in current weekly status (cws), including during the COVID-19 Delta wave in 2020-2021, for those working or seeking work in the 15 years or more age group in urban areas, and the Worker Population Ratio (WPR). Even the PLFS April 2025 monthly bulletin pegs the LFPR in cws for urban women at 25.7 percent and the WPR at 23.5 percent.^[79] Surveys such as the PLFS and the Udyam Registration Portal,^[80] the mandatory government platform for MSME registrations, thus flatten the distinctions between statistical visibility and genuine ownership, and integration. Table 3 shows the LFPR and WPR among urban women from 2017-2018 to 2023-2024.

Table 3: LFPR and WPR among Urban Women in PLFS Surveys

Survey Year	Labour Force Participation Rate (%)	Worker Participation Rate (%)
2017-18	15.9	14.2
2018-19	16.1	14.5
2019-20	18.5	16.8
2020-21	18.6	17.0
2021-22	18.8	17.3
2022-23	20.2	18.7
2023-24	22.3	20.7

Source: Compiled by the authors from PLFS Annual Reports^{[81],[82],[83],[84],[85],[86],[87]} Figures represent percentages for women aged 15 years and above in usual status (ps+ss).^[g]

While the LFPR and WPR for urban women show a consistent increase in their statistical visibility between 2017-18 and 2023-24, they do not reveal the quality, stability, or security of employment. Administrative datasets, such as the Udyam Registration Portal (URP), Udyam Sakhi Portal (USP), and Udyam Assist Portal (UAP), which were launched to formalise and track MSMEs, do not differentiate between women-owned and women-run enterprises. According to official data, the URP and UAP registered 22,073,675 women-owned MSMEs by November 2023.^[88] However, ground evidence and a 2022 NITI Aayog report revealed that up to 30 percent of these cases merely reflected ‘disguised ownership’, in which MSMEs were proxy-registered in the name of women to avail benefits.^[89] Here, enterprises are registered in women’s names to access scheme benefits without corresponding controls over assets, decision-making, or profit. MSME registration data, as a result, tend to overstate women’s entrepreneurial integration.

Even in the revised PLFS survey, the language of self-employment, volunteer work, or helper roles reflects the state’s avoidance of confronting exploitative structures. The absence of a written contract (Column 11, code 1) becomes normalised and social protection remains a distant promise (Column 13: not eligible for any, code 8).^[90] Such gaps in official statistics misrepresent the state of women’s work.

The Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE) indicates that women own 26.2 percent of proprietary enterprises.^[91] However, many of them are ‘self-employed,’ operating without registration, home-based or informal, lacking formal contract or scalability pathways, solely dependent on informal networks for spatial and financial capital.^[92] Studies by Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA),^[93] Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO),^[94] and the International Labour Organization (ILO)^[95] also document how women entrepreneurs are forced to rely on reinforcing dependency, limiting their bargaining power.

Figure 2: Share of Self-Employed, Regular Wage/Salaried and Unemployment Rate among Urban Women

Source: Authors’ own, using data from Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) Annual Reports.^[96]

PLFS data indicate a shift in the composition of urban women’s employment. While the share of self-employed women increased from 34.7 percent to 42.3 percent between 2017-18 and 2023-24, regular wage/salaried employment declined from 52.1 percent to 49.4 percent (Figure 2). This shift suggests that limited access to secure formal jobs, care work, and exclusion from institutional networks may be driving women into self-employment, not by choice but by necessity.^[97] This, along with the new labour codes, reflect a shift away from employment-based protections to individualised risk-bearing. The codes inadvertently expand fixed-term employment and contractual arrangements, thereby weakening collective security and leaving self-employed and home-based women workers outside the ambit of protection, reinforcing informality as a mode of governance and not a temporary condition.

Digital Labour, Home-Based Work, and the Burden of Care

Global initiatives such as the UN Trade and Development’s eTrade for Women,^[98] the World Bank’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi),^[99] and the International Trade Centre’s SheTrades^[100] aim to address the gender gap in the digital economy. The World Trade Organization (WTO) underscores that while digital platforms and export markets offer new opportunities, women benefit only with targeted reforms such as digital literacy training and inclusive trade policies.^[101] A 2020 report by the WTO and World Bank on Women and Trade highlights that even women active in business tend to be excluded from global and national value chains due to a lack of access to information, financial capital, and institutional networks.^[102] It also highlights the requirement of gender-disaggregated procurement data, supportive procurement design with waived eligibility conditions and capacity-building for informal enterprises to participate in public supply chains. The report recommends dedicated outreach, simplified bidding processes, and pre-qualification support for women’s participation.

The ILO’s Decent Work Agenda also outlines dimensions such as access to sustainable livelihoods, social protection, and the right to organise.^[103] Yet, in India, key legislations like the Minimum Wages Act and the Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act 2008 equate the identity of a ‘worker’ with someone engaged in paid activity, overlooking the crucial economic and social contributions of unpaid care work and home-based labour.^[104],[105] Even as government portals and platforms like Meesho work towards women’s autonomy and market access, they implicitly assume a baseline of infrastructure access, digital literacy, and intra-household mobility, reinforcing the conformist notion of spatial and decision-making power within homes and reproducing exclusion in the digital marketplace.^[106],[107]

Emerging assessments of platform-based work and digital marketplaces indicate that while platforms expand visibility and entry, they often reproduce exclusion through opaque algorithms, unequal access to digital infrastructure, weak grievance redressal, and buyer-driven rating systems, particularly for women microentrepreneurs and workers. Digital platforms appear more accessible than formalised physical market spaces, where licences, zoning laws, shop acts, and informal gatekeeping restrict entry. This ease of entry does not translate to economic security or integration, as digital platforms are neither inherently empowering nor uniformly exclusionary. Their impact depends on how they intersect with existing spatial, regulatory, and care infrastructures.

For example, Meesho claims to have enabled millions of women entrepreneurs through reselling on social platforms. Yet this model does not guarantee logistics infrastructure, financial support, or public tenders.^[108] An analysis of the heterogeneity of digital platform work in India shows that even when women manage to access better sales or contract-based platform work, they remain subject to algorithmic governance, ranking fluctuations, commission models, and buyer-side dominance.^[109] Women selling on such platforms frequently operate informally, without a trade license, GST registration, or access to vendor IDs and credit.

At the same time, home-based work reshapes domestic space into a hybrid economic zone but reinforces traditional hierarchies and burdens.^[110] Home-based and digital work, framed as flexible and empowering in policy design, often compounds the burden of unpaid domestic labour and care work.^[111] Time-use surveys and ILO studies consistently show that urban women spend five times as much time as men on unpaid domestic and care work.^[112] Women’s time poverty due to unpaid care burdens constrains their ability to enter or scale up economic activity.^[113] Disproportionately borne by women, this burden remains invisible in economic policy, driving them to informal and low-paid sectors and into a cycle of exclusion from growth-oriented opportunities.^[114]

The absence of a recognised workspace is both a domestic constraint and a structural barrier to market integration. Without spatial legitimacy, such as a shop licence, vending certificate, or recognised place of business, women operating from home remain excluded from procurement systems, credit eligibility, and supply chain negotiations, even when their enterprises are economically viable. As briefly discussed earlier, most women who assume income-generating roles from within their homes do not have a separate workspace and often operate out of a corner of a shared room or a temporary setup, often within overcrowded homes.^[115] The house is not a private site of freedom for women, but a regulated space, structured by patriarchal control.^[116] They end up doing more unpaid care work, which is feminised, unacknowledged, and undercounted in official statistics. Such work may offer visibility but does not translate to autonomy or institutional and economic stakeholdership. Spatial justice begins by addressing these invisible burdens that reduce women to the liminal domestic spaces.

Field observations across Indian cities indicate that home-based and small-scale enterprises operating from residential neighbourhoods often face contestation from neighbours and local authorities, who perceive livelihood activities as illegitimate or ‘commercial’ uses of domestic electricity and water connections.^[117] These routine forms of regulation highlight how women’s economic work is frequently rendered spatially invisible, with the absence of planning and regulatory frameworks that recognise domestic space as a legitimate site of production, reinforcing the limits of home-based entrepreneurship as a pathway to substantive market integration.

Unlike physical markets—where associations, unions, or social networks offer some form of negotiation or collective voice—digital platforms are governed by fragmented, largely non-enforceable safeguards. To be sure, the Union Budget 2025-26 formally recognised gig and platform work as a distinct category,^[118] and the e-Shram registration and healthcare coverage under Ayushman Bharat signal growing state acknowledgement. However, they overlook the need to establish binding standards for contracts, algorithmic management, payment timelines, grievance redressal, and collective representation.

Comparative regulatory developments underscore this gap. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act^[119] and the International Labour Conference’s (ILC)^[120] binding convention for decent work in the platform economy explicitly address platform gatekeeping, data rights, and worker protections. In contrast, India’s current framework treats platform work primarily as self-employment, dispersing risk onto individual workers and microentrepreneurs without a corresponding accountability for the platform ecosystem.

By promoting digital entrepreneurship, the state has disguised structural exclusion as flexibility, treating platform work as self-employment and informal work, rather than integrating it into the broader framework of urban economic inclusion. Platform economies operate within broader structures of urban infrastructure, labour regulation, and spatial inequality. As researchers who study platform capitalism note, platforms reorganise markets but do not necessarily redistribute power or risk. Digital empowerment must be accompanied by spatial and institutional empowerment, thereby holding up the present paper’s central argument that women’s economic stakeholder status depends on material urban infrastructure as well.^[121]

Spatial Justice and Economic Stakeholdership: A Theoretical Lens

Women’s exclusion from marketplaces, supply chains, and procurement networks is spatially produced, institutionally maintained, and ideologically justified. Markets are not neutral sites of exchange; they are institutionalised public spaces embedded in the power structure of urban planning, trade regulation, and spatial governance. Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City,’^[122] which speaks of the collective right of the “vulnerable and disfavoured” to access, shape, transform and participate in the governance and design to ensure an adequate standard of living, is not merely a claim to access urban space, but a demand to co-create and co-govern the urban space.

Women’s exclusion from urban marketplaces reflects patterns documented across feminist urban studies and labour research. Everyday mobility restrictions, safety discourses, and risk negotiations systematically shape women’s access to public economic spaces in Indian cities. Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of space as socially constructed provides the theoretical basis for understanding how power relations are embedded in spatial access.^[123] Judith Butler’s work on performativity explains how gender norms influence who is recognised as a legitimate economic actor in public space.^[124] Field observations from Bengaluru, Delhi, Kozhikode, and Thiruvananthapuram reinforce these documented patterns.

In India, the governance and architecture of physical markets often treat women’s presence as that of vendors or customers rather than owners, planners, or negotiators, excluding them from meaningful participation.^[125] Urban informality is a mode of urbanisation that shapes spatial and economic outcomes. Informality is embedded in planning and regulation, where formal and legal categories and state practices determine which spaces and activities are legitimised and which are marginalised.^[126] City governance constructs informality through differential legality, producing segmented access to urban spaces, markets, and infrastructure. They face eviction from vending zones, displacement due to Smart City beautification projects, and exclusion from shop licencing or redevelopment schemes, which reflect this process. Formal structures that systematically prioritise scale, turnover, and infrastructural capacity further contribute to their invisibility in procurement systems.

In contrast to its traditional, static views, a market is not just a bounded economic site. As Massey argues, space is fundamentally relational, lived, and co-constructed, constantly being produced and reproduced through power, identity, mobility, connections, and labour, shaping social and political realities.^[127] Women’s inability to access markets as full stakeholders stems from a spatial logic that separates economic space from reproductive space, assuming that only certain bodies (typically male, mobile, and with capital access) are legitimate occupants.

Care work, unpaid labour, and informal self-employment are also structurally devalued in India’s economic model, with women’s home-based and digital entrepreneurship, though viewed as flexible or empowering, could be a result of their exclusion from public infrastructure, capital and secure employment.^[128] Such perceptions of empowerment often mask the state’s failure to ensure structural access and redistribution.^[129] Though e-commerce has facilitated women’s economic contribution through home-based work, it has also inadvertently created a façade of formalisation without protection or registration, and without representation, leaving a gap between symbolic inclusion and substantive empowerment.

These theories argue that ‘mere presence’ or visibility is not enough. From vending zones and supply chains to GeM and zoning committees, genuine inclusion and empowerment of women require their involvement as equal stakeholders, the ability to co-own the space, access to institutions, and negotiation skills. This requires recognising and reimagining the institutional and knowledge networks that marginalise women’s labour, knowledge, and presence in economic governance.

Global Case Studies and Local Best Practices

Global frameworks and local practices provide models for reimagining women’s entrepreneurship. ITC’s SheTrades initiative promotes women’s participation in global trade by facilitating access to international buyer networks and offering training on export quality standards, packaging, and procurement norms. It provides platforms for advocacy of gender-inclusive trade policies across sectors such as packaging, catering, handmade goods, and basic services.^[130]

However, women’s economic participation also often flourishes outside formal regulatory frameworks. For example, women traders at the Nigeria-Benin border navigate informal cross-border economies using kinship, social networks, and community logic, rather than relying on formal permits or licences, like patterns observed among street vendors in Indian cities, where footfall, familiarity, and social safety shape vending practices more than official zoning. On the other hand, Washington’s Women Build Night Market demonstrates how women reclaim urban space through self-governed, community-driven economies outside formal hours and design frameworks.

While these models challenge the assumption that formalisation alone guarantees inclusion, they underscore how women are visible in markets but remain structurally excluded from policy-recognised roles such as licenced traders, procurement suppliers, or market planners. Institutional recognition, targeted procurement access, and integration into supply chains are critical, as such informal, trust-based networks cannot substitute state-enabled inclusion.

In India, Kerala’s Kudumbashree demonstrates how decentralised governance, financial cooperatives, and municipal integration enable women to participate and co-govern market spaces. Kudumbashree’s state-supported neighbourhood groups and micro-enterprises participate in public procurement and move beyond home-based work by accessing physical spaces like stalls or kiosks. By including women’s collectives in state planning, Kudumbashree provides a framework for structural integration, institutionalising access to stalls, credit, and decisions-making.^[131] Kudumbashree’s integration of women’s collectives into local government planning processes institutionalised their access to credit, markets and decision-making, rather than individualising it. At the same time, evidence also suggests that within community-based institutions, entrenched caste and social hierarchies continue to shape access to resources, decision-making authority, and the distribution of benefits.^[132] In Imphal, Manipur, women-run market collectives such as Ima Keithel (Mother’s Market), Asia’s largest women-run market, show how cultural legitimacy, spatial centrality, and community-backed commerce can generate women-dominated economic zones.^[133]

These examples highlight the importance of recognising markets as both, economic sites and socially embedded institutions shaped by governance, legitimacy, and collective organisation. Policy interventions grounded in self-help groups and microenterprise networks must account for how caste and social dynamics mediate women’s institutional participation and economic stakeholdership. Assuming homogenous empowerment through collectivisation alone could only reproduce these hierarchies.

SEWA has pushed for the recognition of informal workers as contributors to the urban economy. SEWA Bazaars^[134] and rural-urban market linkages serve as models of supply chain access, creating platforms for price negotiation, visibility, and scaling. A study of six SEWA social enterprises, including Lok Swasthya Mandali, Gujarat; Ruaab, Delhi; Karnabhumi, Bihar; Delhi Credit Cooperative; Bihar Cooperative Credit; and Sarthak in Uttarakhand and Punjab, found that more than 60 percent of members’ income came directly from these collectives, structured with member ownership, governance, and broad participation.^[135] SEWA’s Enterprise Support System (ESS) acts as a grassroots accelerator boosting capacities in areas such as pricing, marketing, and financial planning. However, SEWA’s limited reach in urban retail and its dependence on cooperative logic also highlight the need for more state-backed mechanisms of urban integration.

A 2018 ILO study of SEWA’s women’s cooperative models in the informal sector recognised that mere employment or income support was not enough, as even well-established, organised, skilled and recognised women’s collectives struggle with stable market linkages.^[136] Despite SEWA’s more recent collaborations with formal procurement platforms, such as GeM, aimed at broader markets and easier registration and training, such constraints continue to linger. ^[137],[138]

Policy Recommendations

For women to participate as equal stakeholders in the marketplace, policy must move beyond mere visibility and engage with structural, spatial, and institutional barriers that govern markets. While frameworks, such as SEWA’s ESS, recognise the social and financial dimensions of women’s entrepreneurship, they often overlook the spatial and institutional barriers that shape urban economic participation.^[139] Table 4 builds on this framework to highlight the missing dimension necessary for the structural and spatial integration of women entrepreneurs.

Table 4: Defining Women’s Enterprise Success in Urban Markets: An Expanded Model

Category	Proposed Goal	Key Indicators
Spatial Integration	Access to market spaces.	Vendor identity cards, licences, access to vending zones or rental shops with tenure security and participation in designing spaces that meet their infrastructural needs, including toilets and daycare centres.
Stakeholdership	Participation in Governance.	Membership in vendor associations, RWAs, municipal boards and trade committees.
Supply Chain Access	Inclusion in mainstream procurement networks.	Ability to bid for GeM contracts, and local wholesale access.
Scalability and hiring	Ability to grow and hire staff.	Increase in volume of orders, the ability to hire non-family labour and enhance visibility beyond the home economy.
Legal and Regulatory Fit	Ability to comply without exclusion.	GST/FSSAI registration, exemption access, documentation and paperwork support.
Care Infrastructure	Minimising the burden of unpaid work.	Access to childcare, flexible timings.

Source: Authors’ own, based on the SEWA ESS Baseline Brief.^[140] 

A. Governance and Procurement 

1. Women’s enterprise policies must recognise the diminished employment protections under the labour codes, with stronger convergence between livelihood schemes and social security mechanisms to prevent entrepreneurship from becoming a risk-transfer instrument.
2. Introducing mandatory post-disbursal reporting frameworks would enable policymakers to assess whether financial access translates into substantive economic participation and market integration.
3. Ensure that the 3 percent GeM procurement quota for women-led enterprises is enforced, not restricted to low-margin sectors.
4. Simplify bid criteria by waiving requirements for turnover, experience and OEM certification^[141] for microenterprises and introduce alternative eligibility models, such as SHG-backed guarantees and vendor pooling.
5. Establish ward-level Vendor Support Cells in each city to facilitate the onboarding of women into procurement platforms, including digital training, document preparation, and tax literacy.
6. Facilitate decentralised, cluster-based procurement, promoting collective enterprises, cooperatives and women SHGs through municipal-level contracts.
7. Commercial banks, MFIs, and public sector lenders must participate in women-focused entrepreneurship schemes to demonstrate market linkage outcomes, such as buyer contracts, procurement access or retail integration into their success metrics, along with loan disbursal and repayment.
8. The government must undertake a comprehensive review of all its schemes for post-loan, post-subsidy outcomes, sustainability, and business-scaling indicators, and include them in the official monitoring framework, especially for women-led microenterprises.

B. Urban Licensing, Zoning and Regulations

1. Amend the Shops and Establishments Acts to account for home-based, hybrid, and care work, as well as conducting businesses without employees.
2. Relax working hour restrictions by removing curfews that prevent women from owning or managing shops in evening and night markets, with design and infrastructural changes to ensure safety.
3. Allow mixed-use zones and home-based units to access simplified trade licences and integrate licencing procedures with planning mechanisms.
4. Recognise women’s enterprises in non-commercial zones by integrating them into various city-level and SHG policies.

C. MSME and Udyam Schemes

1. Recognise collectives, informal initiatives and hybrid units as valid economic entities, along with individual registered units.
2. Integration of GST, Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), trade licence and Udyam registration into a single window tailored for women-led micro businesses.
3. Conduct regular surveys of women entrepreneurs, especially in informal sectors, to revise eligibility, documentation norms, and training modules.

D. Institutional Representation and Stakeholder Mapping for Planning 

1. Make women’s representation mandatory in market boards, municipal licencing committees, and Town Vending Committees.
2. Establish dedicated city-level Market Women’s Cells to provide women entrepreneurs with an avenue to file grievances and receive support.
3. Mandate gender audits of commercial zoning in every Master Plan and Smart City proposal. Designate dedicated women-managed commercial hubs or night bazaars.

E. Digital to Hybrid Inclusion

• Extend infrastructure support, including storage, physical kiosks, toilets and child-care spaces.
• Support hybrid, digital and physical models to allow women vendors to link their GeM profiles to offline stores or vending units.
• Extend labour protection, social security, grievance redressal, and payment timelines to women on online e-commerce platforms, such as Meesho and Instagram.

F. Care Work and Ownership

1. Recognise care work and unpaid labour as constraints, not flexibility.
2. Consult women for designing policies ‘for women’ and fixing working hours.
3. Track registered MSMEs to establish access, who run and control them, and who make decisions to understand actual scenarios rather than taking increased LFPR and MSME registration data as a marker of increased women labour force participation.

Conclusion

In India’s current policy imagination, women’s entrepreneurship is celebrated for its symbolic presence rather than its role in nurturing women’s agency in the market ecosystem. As such, women may have become more visible in registration databases and employment surveys, but they remain invisible in procurement decisions, vendor negotiations, and trade policy. Entrepreneurship is not only about credit and digital visibility, but also about belonging, governance, and spatial presence. India’s urban marketplaces are characterised by the exclusion of informal workers, women entrepreneurs, vendors, and hybrid enterprises, who remain outside procurement systems, planning frameworks, and institutional networks.

Existing schemes, such as PMEGP, Startup India, GeM, and Udyam, speak the language of inclusion but do not address gatekeeping in supply chains, trade licences, zoning laws, or procurement. They on-board women without integrating them into the market dynamics. What appears to be flexibility in policy design (home-based or digital entrepreneurship) is often experienced as a constrained survival strategy, reinforcing women’s peripheral position in urban markets.

Spatial justice must begin by acknowledging and addressing these invisible burdens that limit women to domestic spaces and exclude them from full economic stakeholdership. Digital push, while offering new channels to support women, does not resolve the foundational spatial inequalities that structure women’s work, care work, workspace precarity, and surveillance in home-based enterprises. Algorithmic precarity, delayed payments, or the absence of collective bargaining affect gig and platform work, often labelling it as “entrepreneurial freedom”, while expecting women to navigate a market they are not institutionally supported to enter.

Beyond the metrics of registration and credit, policies should reflect a vision of spatial justice and structural changes, in which women not only participate but also co-govern the marketplaces. Marketplaces must be reimagined as spaces where women are not informal sellers on the peripheries, but equal stakeholders. Such recognition demands a structural redistribution of legal protection, policy recognition, and spatial legitimacy. Loan support, skilling, registration and recognition, while welcome, cannot solely bring the desired inclusion without institutional reforms that restructure geographies and power structures.

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Durga Narayan is a researcher working on issues of labour, interstate migration, and urban policy.

Dhaval Desai is Senior Fellow and Vice President, ORF Mumbai.

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All views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors, and do not represent the Observer Research Foundation, either in its entirety or its officials and personnel.

Endnotes

• Gender
• India
• government e-marketplace
• government initiatives for women entrepreneurship
• schemes for women entrepreneurs in india
• united nations sustainable development goals
• women economic empowerment
• women entrepreneurship
• women in employment
• women in marketplace
• women workforce in india

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