When the world slowed down after COVID, I found myself spending long stretches of time at our small farmhouse in Khanapur, a quiet village on the outskirts of Pune. I had spent years working in education and community spaces, yet living in a rural village revealed a reality I had never been this close to. Khanapur moved at its own rhythm. The days were long and earthy, the nights peaceful, but beneath that calm lay a life of relentless effort. I had always known rural families faced challenges, but knowing something and witnessing it are entirely different experiences.
In Khanapur I saw women carrying the weight of their households with extraordinary resilience. They worked in the fields, loaded bricks at construction sites, mixed cement alongside men, and then returned home to cook, clean, fetch water, tend to elders and help children with homework. They did everything, yet their role was never acknowledged as economic contribution. Their lives moved from one responsibility to the next, without space to dream, pause or grow. Salary inequality was silent but everywhere. Women worked as hard as the men, sometimes harder, but were paid significantly less. Many spoke quietly about husbands who spent most of their wages on alcohol, leaving the women to stretch whatever little
was left into the next morning.
Then one morning Durga came to me. She had bruises on her arm and her eyes held a tiredness I cannot forget. Her husband, a mason, had beaten her the previous night and locked her and her two young sons outside. I offered her my home any time she needed a safe space, but I saw a familiar fear in her eyes. Women in villages carry generational fear. They learn to endure long before they learn to speak. In the days that followed, I began to understand that Durga was not an exception. She was a mirror of hundreds of women in the village. She worked in the fields during the
day, returned home to manage the entire household, and still lived with financial insecurity and emotional distress.
Around the same time one of my students said, Maam, let us start something in women entrepreneurship. We sat with notebooks and ideas, and discussed models and plans, but nothing felt real enough. Nothing matched the faces I saw every day. The answer did not come from a strategy meeting. It came from watching these women live their daily lives. Women like Durga did not need complicated training centres. They did not need long commutes. They did not need to leave their children behind. They needed opportunity that walked into their village.
Opportunity that sat beside them.
Opportunity that understood their constraints and respected their realities.
The missing piece clicked into place one evening when Durga said softly, I want to earn for my boys. Mason work cannot give us enough. She was not asking for charity. She was asking for dignity. That moment became the seed of Bandhini.
The name Bandhini means to bind and to connect. It felt perfect because that was exactly what we wanted to build. A program that bound together skill, dignity, opportunity and community. A program that connected women to income in a way that did not pull them away from their homes.
In August 2021, we launched Bandhini. Not from a conference room. Not from a theoretical plan. It was born in a small SHG room with two sewing machines, scraps of fabric and two women, Durga and Sarita, who gathered the courage to try. Their initial stitches were slow and uneven, but their determination was the strongest thread in the room. Within a few weeks they created their first cloth bags. Small products, but enormous symbols of possibility. Today, Durga is a different woman. She stitches confidently, manages orders, trains other women and saves steadily for her children’s education. The fear in her eyes has been replaced with purpose. Her home feels lighter. Her sons look at her with pride. The shift is not only financial. It is emotional. It is generational.
Bandhini may be Odser’s youngest program, but it carries some of our deepest impact. A single sewing machine changed Durga’s household. Imagine what a hundred sewing machines can do for a hundred homes. Imagine the stability. Imagine the confidence. Imagine the daughters growing up seeing their mothers earn with dignity. Durga’s story is not only the beginning of Bandhini. It is a reminder of why Bandhini must grow.
If you believe women like Durga deserve opportunity, safety and income of their own, I invite you to support Bandhini. Your contribution can place a skill, a tool and a pathway to independence into the hands of a woman who has waited her whole life for that chance.
Together, we can change not just one household but hundreds.
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