Gitika is a petite, lean woman in her mid-forties. She is dressed in a simple white cotton saree, with pastel splashes along the border. Her tone is measured and even as she greets us at the entrance of her workshed. As she ushers us into the small room, I notice sunlight streaming in through the… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Gitika, Assam
Cooks and cleaners account for 5.4 million of India’s 48 million urban women workers (Periodic Labour Force Survey, 2024). For many, aspirational goals such as upskilling, starting a business and unplanned shocks like medical emergencies create a pressing need for accessible credit. Far from a homogenous demand profile, women in gig work represent a diverse… Continue reading The Last Mile: Understanding Credit Access and Financial Behaviour Among Women Gig Workers
At 87%, India has one of the highest fintech adoption rates, well above the global average. Fintech’s digital distribution across multiple domains: payments, lending, wealth management, insurance, and fraud management, has narrowed the gap for accessing financial services. But when we zoom in on semi-urban and rural women, the picture changes. Uptake remains stubbornly low.… Continue reading Solving the Trust Gap in Fintech: Lessons from Women-Centric Fintechs in Bharat
Abhay Kulkarni, Deepak Anand, and Sudhir Deshpande co-founded MediVault Informatics (MI) in 2019, and onboarded a fourth co-founder, Suraj Garg in 2022. Before founding the healthtech venture, they had been co-workers and friends at a data analytics firm. Over the next few years, MI expanded its technology and client portfolio, raised external funding… Continue reading MediVault Informatics: Negotiating co-founder discord in a growth-stage startup
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… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Weaving Against the Odds – The Entrepreneurship Journey of Rural Women in Handloom
When Sunita began selling her homemade spice blends from her home in Ujjain, it was not a leap of entrepreneurial ambition but an act of necessity. With her husband’s income uncertain, her enterprise became the household’s spine. She negotiates orders on WhatsApp, accepts UPI payments from customers, and keeps a careful mental account of costs… Continue reading Mind the gap: Financial products that women in India need but don’t have!
Indian health-tech startups, striving to build AI-based products, are often stumped by their limited access to relevant medical data. Most commercial and open-source datasets originate from Western archives based on medical studies conducted on the Caucasian male, who, for the longest time, represented the whole of humanity. Furthermore, unverified third-party datasets are riddled with… Continue reading 5C Network: A Socio-Technical Approach to Building Data Moats
I am at a rural homestead with my colleague in a quiet village in the Kamrup district of Assam. The house is well-built and roomy, with a sloping roof – a deliberate design requirement in this part of the world on account of frequent rain. A couple of goats are tethered to a pole, creepers… Continue reading Women of Bharat: Vibha Kalita, Assam
Apollo 11 made history. And, it took us 57 years to recreate that. The Orion Spacecraft (Artemis II mission) flew four humans around the moon. They travelled a distance of 252,756 miles, which is roughly 10 times around the Earth or the entire length of India 126 times over. The distance is demanding. The engineering that… Continue reading Journey to the Moon: How 11 deaf men made space travel possible
The RBI recently released a whitepaper for public consultation on tackling digital payment fraud. The paper presents pre and post-transaction strategies for P2P fraud prevention that safeguard against Authorised Push Payment (APP) frauds i.e. frauds where the victim consensually transfers money to the fraudster. In this blog, we focus on one particular strategy: lagged credit… Continue reading Lagged Credit and the Fight Against APP Fraud
India has almost 958 million internet users; more Jan Dhan account holders than the population of the USA, and a UPI stack that processes more than 20 billion transactions every month (that’s roughly 7500 per second). But the benefits of this infrastructure favour those who have the most leverage. Keeping a gender lens on internet… Continue reading The other internet: Infrastructure waiting to be adopted
Women’s economic empowerment is tied to their agency—their ability to make financial decisions and control resources. This extends to their active participation in the economy through self-employment and entrepreneurship. According to the 2025 Annual Survey of Unincorporated Sector Enterprises (ASUSE), nationwide, women entrepreneurs run 21.38 million proprietary establishments. However, their capacity to scale their enterprises… Continue reading What women need from fintechs is not another feature (but a community of peers)