We all live with constraints throughout our existence. 

We navigate our lives and purposes around these constraints. 

Over the course of several conversations with eight to ten women producing silk and cotton products in rural Assam, what emerged was not just a story of enterprise, but one of persistence within deeply embedded structural constraints. In this blog, we explore the constraints rural women artisans face in setting up and running their own weaving businesses, and the costs of pushing against them.

Rukmani lives with chronic and acute back pain. Years ago, before she could afford the fare, Rukmani used to walk seven, sometimes ten kilometres to the local NGO that bought her cloth, and the same distance home. Rukmini denied herself transport money, as it dipped into significant household savings. Although she does not walk the distance anymore, her body is still repaying for the journeys she undertook without household or institutional support.

The Boundaries

For most of these women, running a business is something negotiated inside a patriarchal order, not granted by it. Since land and assets are seldom registered in women’s names, they lack the collateral required by formal financial institutions. The choice of trade is shaped less by opportunity than by what is considered socially acceptable and geographically reachable: food processing, handicrafts, agriculture, and dairy. As one of them told us: “The men here sell alcohol in shops. Being a woman, I have to be careful of what kind of business I associate myself with!”

Even when women do engage in income-generating work, it is frequently undervalued, more often seen as supplementary, even when it is substantive. This perception has real consequences, particularly in women’s ability to access formal credit.

The Cost

The most common constraint was the most mundane. Distance. These women’s homes are scattered across large areas, and even short-distance travel incurs costs that cannot be dismissed as daily expenses. The NGO that buys and resells their products is 10 to 15 kilometres away, and the trip can cost ₹60 each way, a sum that has to be weighed against the value of whatever they are carrying to sell. For Vibha, sourcing raw materials from Guwahati, the nearest city, means a ₹200 one-way trip. Every visit becomes a calculation, not a routine. “I cannot make frequent visits. I need to plan these visits carefully with respect to costs and returns.”

Technology 

It would be easy to assume technology closes this gap. 

Most of the women own smartphones. Some have tried selling through social media, and a few have set up Instagram pages for their products. 

But the devices are old, too old to run newer apps well, and the gap between owning a phone and using it as a shopfront is wider than it looks. Photographs come out poorly. Confidence in presenting a product online is thin. The page goes up, and then it goes quiet. Access to a tool is not the same as access to the market the tool promises. As one of them summed it up: “Downloading an app, installing it and running it takes hours. Sometimes, the app is not compatible with the smartphone.”

Credit Access

Access to credit remains another significant barrier. Women-led enterprises, including government-supported co-operative societies and Self-Help Groups, struggle to secure adequate financing. One such co-operative society was unable to obtain a ₹5 lakh loan due to concerns over cash flow stability. In practice, most women rely on collective borrowing mechanisms, reinforcing both the strength and the limitations of group-based financial inclusion.

Can constraints be lifted?

The constraints these women face are not outliers. The handloom economy leans on her more than most people realise. The Ministry of Textiles records that roughly half of India’s handloom workers come from the northeast, and Assam alone accounts for 70% of them. Almost all are rural women with over half of them earning less than ₹5,000 a month. An entire craft, woven into the country’s cultural identity, rests on the labour of women who are paid the least and asked to travel the farthest to sell what they make. 

It is tempting to look at all this and reach for the familiar fixes; digital training, government schemes or driving ambition through empowerment initiatives. But the fact remains that ambition is constantly being tempered against constraints. These women are already running enterprises across distance, debt, ageing phones, and assets they do not legally hold. What is missing is an enabling ecosystem: a credit system that recognises their work as real, an easily accessible market, and infrastructure that does not extract a permanent toll on their bodies. These stories from Assam underscore a central insight: the entrepreneurial journeys of women are not defined by a lack of ambition, but by the constraints within which that ambition must operate.

Published July 2026. Authored by Valerie Mendonca and Vijeth Acharya.