SEWA Ahmedabad  CD and MP3

In India most women have to work to survive.Many of then spend from four to eight hours each day simply gathering firewood and water with which to cook. They work another eight hours to ten hours trying to earn a few rupees to buy food and shelter and the bare necessities of life.

Most of these women are self-employed. This means they have no legal status: they're frequently harrssed by the police, exploited by wholesalers, their earnings frequently taken by their menfolk.

But in recent years, many Indian women have been fighting back, organising themselves into associations of self-employed women with their own banks and training schemes. It's been said that of all the social reform movements in India, the women's movement is the most impressive and the most sustained.

Julian visited one of the best-known of these groups, the Self-Employed Women's Association or SEWA in the city of Ahmedabad in western India.