Available for sale at a local arts-and-crafts exhibition stall in Ahmedabad are miniature crocheted products. The display counter brims with tiny hand-woven superheroes ready to fight, blooming sunflowers, cherries, jellyfish, multi-coloured bumblebees, dogs, and pink hearts. They’re attached to keyrings and hair clips for use as accessories. Selling them is Sitara Zhimo from the Chekiye Village of Dimapur, a district in Nagaland bordering the state of Assam.

“I have been crocheting since I was sixteen,” she recounts. Sitara is petite with greying hair and visible crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She smiles as we approach and sets out her products. Accompanying the crocheted items at her stall are tall, cylindrical vases stuffed with handcrafted artificial flowers made by curling colourful crepe paper. “We sell many more products such as gloves, sweaters, socks, mufflers, and other winterwear. But nobody wants to buy them in July, so we only bring decor pieces and accessories in the summer.”

Married at the age of eighteen, Sitara did not receive much formal education beyond secondary schooling. While she continued to crochet after getting married, she never planned to make a business of it as most of her time and energy went towards managing her household and raising her four children. The need to monetise her skill only arose after the untimely demise of her husband from an illness, leaving her as the primary breadwinner. At the time, her eldest was in middle school. The youngest was only five years old.

To stay afloat, she had to make a hard choice. “I enrolled all my children in boarding school right after,” she tells us. “I couldn’t constantly look after them while managing a business. My only goal was to earn enough money to educate my children.”

Her friends encouraged her to start selling her handmade crochet products. The idea was later consolidated at an agency for handicrafts businesses in Kohima registered under the Ministry of Textiles, which enabled her with a license to sell artisanal products.. Through this agency, she began to avail herself of the benefits of several government schemes for women artisans. Visits to the agency also provided Sitara with guidance on selling her products through a Self-Help Group (SHG) (1); thus starting off her entrepreneurial journey.

“A few years back, I took a loan of ₹1,00,000 through the SHG to expand my business, in addition to the ₹80,000 that I invested out-of-pocket,” Sitara tells us. She currently leads an SHG of 10 women, all of whom are closely involved with her business. They craft the products, and she directly buys them in bulk from them at a discounted price. Later, Sitara sells them at artisanal exhibitions in metropolitan cities such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, Lucknow, and Delhi.

Currently, the exhibitions are the only medium through which Sitara sells her products. For many artisans like her, from the peripheries of India, exhibitions reinforce cultural identity, while providing economic opportunities. But overwhelming dependence on seasonal exhibitions with limited diversification, increases income precarity. In Sitara’s case, the colder months between September and March are the most profitable for her since she can sell most of her inventory then. But the seasonal nature of her business creates an added pressure to earn enough in the six months to sustain her for the rest of the year. This is exacerbated by an unwillingness to pay on the consumer’s end.

“I buy these keyrings at ₹80 a piece from my friends in Dimapur. If I sell them for anything less than ₹120, I make a loss,” Sitara tells us as a few customers leave her stall empty-handed. Despite their admiration for her craft, customers are quick to undercut her prices and try to negotiate with her.

To break even, Sitara needs to earn between one to two lakh rupees every month. During some months, she can earn as much as five lakhs. But sometimes the exhibitions are loss-making, and when that happens, all costs are borne from her savings. Beyond procurement costs, travel and exhibition expenses tend to pile up. When travelling, she mostly covers her own travel and accommodation costs, shipping inventory expenses, exhibit rents, food, and other miscellaneous expenses.

In addition to the capital costs, there is the cost of time and labour that often goes unaccounted for. Crocheting requires acute attention to detail and dexterity of hands. To create a quality product, one with intricate details, requires at least half-a-day of labour. On a regular day, artisans can only produce two trinkets each, or three to four pairs of socks and gloves.

The income generated from her venture is almost entirely used to maintain her business, cover domestic costs, and support her children. Her youngest is currently in eleventh grade, and his education (including school fees, study material, accommodation, printouts, and other miscellaneous school activities) accounts for significant expenditure for her. Since he lives in the school hostel, she uses a popular UPI (2) app to transfer money to him. “I keep sending him money (through my phone) intermittently. Sometimes the amount is  as small as ₹50, other times it’s ₹500.” These irregular transactions remain untracked.

Sitara saves her leftover profits in a bank account. When her husband was alive, she used to invest ₹15,000 in a life insurance product, but since his demise, she has discontinued this. She is also saving up for a pukka house, whose foundation has been laid, but further construction is stalled due to limited funds.

A recent encounter with financial fraud has shaken her trust in banking institutions. Just the day before we met her, her elder son, who lives in Bengaluru, lost all his savings to a scam link. “I send him pickles every few months from Dimapur,” she narrates. “Yesterday, he received a call from a conman pretending to be a delivery person asking him to send ₹5 on a shared link to assist the delivery. The minute my son clicked it, his account was wiped out.” Angry and dejected, her son has since blocked all his bank accounts and refuses to inform his bank of the incident. According to Sitara, he does not trust the Bank. Sitara herself is unaware of any redressal mechanism or government helpline to assist victims of bank fraud.

While she owns a smartphone and actively uses social media to promote her business, she has no banking or finance-related apps because they hold little perceived value in her daily life. Fraud only widens this gap, keeping her away from tools that could genuinely improve her financial security, whether a savings app, a pension scheme, or access to affordable formal credit. Until financial products demonstrate immediate, tangible value and earn her trust, long-term financial planning for the likes of Sitara will remain a distant aspiration rather than a realistic possibility.

Now nearly fifty years of age, Sitara’s long-term aspiration is to retire and help her children settle down. The travel-intensive nature of her work is no longer sustainable at her age. Despite contributing upwards of a decade to her business, she has limited savings and remains ineligible for conventional government pension schemes. Her children have moved to larger cities and towns—her daughter relocated after her wedding and her sons went in search of better job opportunities, leaving Sitara alone. As our conversation comes to a close, she solemnly confesses that she dreams of one of her children landing a government job. “If even one of my sons can get a government job, I can rest assured that they will have a much more stable life.”

Published September 2026. Authored by Yashika Tanwar and Chitrangada Koley.

(1) Self-help groups (SHGs) are informal communities of 10-25 people from similar social and economic backgrounds. Members tend to pool their financial resources and lend small loans internally. Many SHGs form linkages with banks to access larger financial loans.

(2) Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an RBI regulated entity.