Womanhood and Entrepreneurship: An Uphill Struggle

This article sheds light on the dynamic female entrepreneurs in India and how they have chose to make choices that have been socially relevant and highly impactful.

To everyone who is still blissfully ignorant about what double burden is, I suggest you take this time out to get attuned with the reality of women. Of women and their stories that display triumph, courage, persistence, kindness, love and above everything, passion. When we talk about women in India, we mostly ignore the second shift (another name that double burden is commonly given).

Unpaid labour is a social construct, a very typical one at that and in most cases, grossly called “a women’s duty”. For if you don’t shackle yourselves to the social conventions of domestic oppression, you get accused of being “unladylike” (the horror) and we all know that’s not a label that Indian women should strive for.

This is an ode to women, of women who have consciously chosen to overcome those struggles, past all the accusations, flying above all the offensive comments and more importantly, constantly giving the Indian society an existential crisis. Don’t be mistaken, this is not just for the women who have successfully become entrepreneurs.

It is for the women who have been employed and unemployed, for the financial independence and for battling financial oppression, for the change of social norms and for the struggle, for being amazing by not just choosing to exist, but actively living, seeking, fighting and winning.

1- Aditi Gupta

How many times have you felt ashamed for menstruating? How many times do you check your “that area”on “those days?”. Aditi Gupta has answered our prayers. Menstruation is as taboo as women’s rights in India, in that it’s better off pretending like both of them don’t exist. Aditi Gupta has made it her mission to clear the darkness surrounding this common issue by introducing Menstrupedia.

It is a friendly guide for women to stay active, healthy and aware during periods. It aims to explore this issue from various standpoints- hygiene, awareness, feminism and culture, to talk about a few.

2- Anu Sridharan

Anu Sridharan had this unquenchable thirst to combine technology and society in order for us to be able to harness the full potential of staying informed. She founded NextDrop with a simple vision- “we want to rid the world of its water problems”.

With rapid urbanization and development constantly resulting in water scarcity, her tech savvy platform helps people stay aware of the access to water, the quality and the quantity associated with it. They use real time data to disperse information about status of water services, inconsistencies with the supply pattern and the time of supply etc.

3- Padmaja Ruparel

Padmaja started Indian Angel Network in 2009 and it has grown to be an integral part of the entrepreneurial ecosphere in India, ever since. Back in 2009, she saw an opportunity to tap into a culture that did not support nor finance the entrepreneurial spirit.

“VCs started investing in startups in India over a decade ago but they always invested money raised overseas. The trend is changing but still VCs raise money predominantly overseas. This amount was huge and as an early stage startup, it wouldn’t know what to do with those huge sums of money and VCs wouldn’t even invest. Hence I thought investments in the early stage to be a gap and hence started IAN,” says Padmaja.

4-SocialCops

Prukalpa founded SocialCops along with Varun Banka in the hope of using data to solve critical global challenges. Having had a background in investment banking, she realized how impactful data was when it came to financial banking. However, she kept drawing parallels about how healthcare, education, crime, environment and in general, the development sector didn’t quite have relevant data to be leveraged in the same way. Interestingly enough, crowdfunding helped this project to become a reality.

We hope that these 5 women have started inspiring you already. Being your own boss was never an easy job, additionally with the society clamping you down on all fronts, the journey will definitely not be an easy one. Nothing worth having comes easy, let’s all strive to beat the odds and stay rooted to our vision.

“We learned that governments and other organisations have been collecting a ton of data from citizens across the country on different issues. The problem is not that there’s no data; it’s that the data is really hard to access and use. It exists on numerous government websites, which are difficult to locate and navigate. Once you access the data, it’s difficult to use because it is inconsistent and unstructured. One big component of our work has been finding all of these obscure government data sets, cleaning them, and matching them with other data sets to make them reliable and usable,” she notes.

5- Elsa Marie D’Silva

If every 20 minutes, someone is raped and not all rapes are reported, can you imagine the number of women who get harassed on the streets everyday?” questions Elsa Marie De’Silva.” It is this horrifying thought that made Elsa, Surya and Saloni set up safe city. It is a GIS (Geographic Information System) mapping and uses open source technology to facilitate crowdmapping of information. It is a platform that documents that translates personal experiences of abuse and and sexual harassment in public places into hotspots corresponding to location-based trends. Women can choose to stay anonymous while reporting, the primary focus lies towards reportage and awareness.

Tally Piracy: A Never Ending Struggle for Tally

India has a list of successful companies to boast of in the software services space. Despite being the global leader in the IT space, we are nowhere near the global giants in the products segment. Many reasons can be cited including the lack of motivation to substitute R&D activities. However, there are few organizations that walked the road less travelled and also tasted success. Tally Solutions is certainly one of them. The organization is one of those that changed the perception that software systems are meant to be expensive and complex. It made them accessible as well as affordable to all. Tally has nearly become synonymous to accounting. However, the list of praises stops there. With all the promise it exemplified, the company, more than two decade old hasn’t moved much beyond its territories. As per a Tally insider, piracy has hit the company in a big way.

Over the years, what we have seen is a huge loss of value. There are about 40 lakh businesses in India. So far, IT hardware and software vendors have addressed only 50% of it. Tally has about 7 lakh registered users but the fact also looms that most of them use pirated versions. As per a third party research done over few years ago, about 90% of Tally’s usage is through pirated copies. The good news is that it has now come down to close to 70%. Piracy is one of the primary issues that have been bothering everyone. At times it does seem impossible. On the other hand the businesses in mature markets such as the USA that started at the same time as Tally software have now become big buck organizations. This is because the rate of piracy in such countries is at about 25%.

Given the diversity and spread of our client base, it’s physically not possible to trace and stop piracy at the end user side. Unfortunately, business is not growing at the pace it needs to grow and its only growing incrementally. It has the potential to grow at a great extent and can achieve at least 3 times the growth if not more. This isn’t the case with Tally software alone but the entire IT industry. Tally with its entire latest version Tally ERP 9 marks its presence across 54 cities through more than 9,700 partners. The organization has more than 1000 employees operating in 14 cities. With business spreading around the globe the accounting master is expecting that it counters the threat of piracy which looms over it and provides more sophisticated versions in the near future.

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