The Story of Lakshmi: A Market Vendor’s Struggle for Economic Stability

Every morning, before most households in her neighborhood stir awake, Lakshmi is already on her feet. She prepares a quick meal for her disabled husband, packs her goods, and makes her way to her market stall – the family’s sole source of income. By the time she returns in the evening, there are medicines to arrange, household chores to finish, and a household to hold together. Lakshmi is not a character from a development textbook. She is a real representation of millions of women across South Asia and beyond who operate at the crossroads of informal work, caregiving, and economic survival. Her story offers a revealing lens into the structural barriers that keep women like her trapped at the subsistence level – and what meaningful change could look like.

Balancing the market stall and the household 🔗

Lakshmi runs a small market stall selling vegetables or everyday goods – the kind of work classified under the informal economy, which operates outside formal employment protections, contracts, or benefits. For her, this stall is not a side hustle. It is the primary economic engine of her family.

What makes her situation particularly demanding is the dual burden she carries. At the stall, she manages stock, negotiates with suppliers, handles cash, and deals with customers – often under difficult conditions including heat, physical strain, and harassment from authorities over licensing. At home, she is the primary caregiver for a husband with a physical disability, which means additional time spent on personal care tasks that most households might share between multiple people or access through support services.

This double burden is not unique to Lakshmi. India’s National Time Use Survey 2024 found that 41% of women aged 15-59 participate in caregiving for household members, compared to only 21.4% of men. Women also continue to spend significantly more time daily on unpaid domestic work than their male counterparts. When a family member has a disability, this caregiving responsibility intensifies further, and it almost always falls to the woman in the household.

The time cost alone is staggering. Research published in the journal World Development found that an additional hour of unpaid caregiving per day reduces a woman’s probability of labor market participation by 20 percentage points – with no equivalent effect observed for men. For Lakshmi, this means every hour she spends caring for her husband is an hour she cannot spend expanding her stall, seeking training, or simply resting.

Yet she has no alternative. There is no state-supported home care for people with disabilities in most settings where women like Lakshmi live, no formal respite care, no caregiver support allowance. The care economy, as India’s Press Information Bureau notes, is valued at 15-17% of GDP in contribution – yet the country spends less than 1% of GDP on care infrastructure. Lakshmi’s labor, both at the stall and at home, is essential. But almost none of it is recognized, compensated, or supported.

Financial and social constraints: a wall with many bricks 🔗

Running even a small market stall requires capital – for stock, for storage, sometimes for a cart or a temporary structure. When Lakshmi needs to restock after a bad week, repair something, or cover a medical emergency for her husband, she faces a financing gap that formal banking systems are largely unwilling or unable to fill.

The credit access problem 🔗

Women in the informal sector across developing economies are systematically underserved by financial institutions. UNCTAD data shows that women have less than two-thirds of the legal rights available to men – particularly in the area of entrepreneurship and financial access. Lakshmi likely lacks formal collateral (a property title, a registered business, a credit history) because women in her situation rarely hold assets in their own names.

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have attempted to fill this gap. India’s microfinance sector, now serving over 66 million borrowers with a portfolio of US$44.5 billion, was built largely on the promise of reaching women like Lakshmi. But the reality is more complicated. High interest rates, small loan ceilings, and rigid repayment schedules are poorly suited to the erratic income rhythms of market vending. A bad monsoon week, a sick husband, a festival that kills customer footfall – any of these can make a weekly repayment impossible.

Research from the Brookings Institution found that even when women gain access to savings accounts or credit, they frequently divert business resources to household expenditures due to external pressures – meaning the money meant to grow a business often gets absorbed by the family’s immediate survival needs. For Lakshmi, whose husband’s medical expenses are ongoing, the line between business capital and household survival fund is constantly blurred.

A study on microfinance and street vending in India also highlights that many vendors like Lakshmi lack awareness of available financial schemes in the first place, creating an additional barrier even where programs technically exist.

Social stigma and the weight of perception 🔗

Beyond the financial barriers, Lakshmi navigates social stigma on multiple fronts. Women who work in public markets – managing money, dealing with male suppliers, occupying street-facing commercial space – often face community judgment. In many South Asian contexts, a woman’s presence in public commercial life challenges prevailing norms about gender roles. The Urban Institute’s review of gender norms across low-income countries found that social and religious norms directly restrict women’s access to information, networks, and assets – and these norms emerge as a consistent underlying factor in nearly every economic barrier women face.

For Lakshmi, the stigma is compounded by her husband’s disability. In many communities, a household where a woman is the primary earner and the husband is not working is viewed through a lens of social failure rather than resilience. This perception can affect her relationships with suppliers, credit groups, and even customers. Studies on women street vendors in India consistently document harassment and discrimination in public spaces, insecure work conditions, and a lack of social protection – challenges that are significantly more pronounced for women than for their male counterparts doing similar work.

Women vendors also frequently report that lack of legal recognition worsens their position. Research on women street vendors across India found that operating without formal permits exposes them to harassment and eviction by authorities, making it difficult to sustain their livelihoods and essentially treating their work as illegal even when no viable alternative exists. A woman like Lakshmi, already stretched thin, has little time or knowledge to navigate the bureaucratic processes that could formalize her stall and give her legal protection.

Earning just enough – but not enough to escape 🔗

Lakshmi’s earnings from her stall likely keep the household alive but do not generate savings or allow for investment in growth. This is the defining feature of subsistence-level economic activity: income that covers daily needs without building assets or opening pathways to more stable livelihoods. Her situation is shaped not by lack of effort – she works extraordinary hours – but by structural conditions that cap her earning potential at every turn.

The World Bank notes that globally, more than 710 million women are kept out of the labor market due to family care duties, and millions more face exclusion from financial and digital services. Women’s labor force participation has remained stagnant at 53% globally since 1990, compared to 80% for men. For women already in the informal sector like Lakshmi, the problem is not just participation – it’s the quality, security, and economic ceiling of the work available to them.

The need for support and opportunity 🔗

Lakshmi’s situation is not inevitable. It is the product of specific, identifiable policy and structural gaps – which means it can be changed with targeted, well-designed interventions. The challenge is that the solutions need to be multi-dimensional, because the constraints she faces are multi-dimensional.

Financial inclusion that fits real lives 🔗

Standard loan products are not designed for women like Lakshmi. What she needs are flexible credit mechanisms with repayment terms calibrated to variable income cycles, and loan products tied to her specific context as a market vendor supporting a person with a disability. Research on street food vendors in South Mumbai recommends expanding affordable credit through public finance and microfinancing options specifically designed to prevent over-indebtedness – and pairing this with gender-sensitive provisions like preferential financing for women vendors. Where mobility is restricted due to caregiving responsibilities, mobile banking and doorstep financial services can make a real difference.

Self-Help Groups (SHGs) have shown particular promise in this context. Originated through the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in Gujarat in 1974, the SHG model offers collective loans at reduced interest rates, with peer accountability built in. Beyond credit, these groups create social capital and community – something that directly combats the isolation many women like Lakshmi experience.

Skills training and market integration 🔗

Lakshmi may have years of practical experience at her stall, but formal training in business management, digital payments, or record-keeping could meaningfully expand what she can earn and how she operates. Brookings Institution research identifies three hallmarks of effective training for women entrepreneurs: it must be demand-driven (addressing actual skill gaps), market-centric (teaching how to identify real commercial opportunities), and gender-aware (accounting for the specific constraints women face, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach). Training that does not account for the time limitations of a caregiver, or that is held at times or locations inaccessible to women with household duties, will simply not reach women like Lakshmi.

Care infrastructure and caregiver support 🔗

One of the most direct ways to expand Lakshmi’s economic participation is to reduce – or share – her caregiving burden. The International Growth Centre points to policy responses including universal social protection through cash transfer programs, family-friendly policies extended to the informal sector, and investment in community care infrastructure as critical tools for reducing the care burden on women. Disability-specific support services, caregiver allowances, and access to community health workers could give Lakshmi time she currently does not have – time that could be redirected toward growing her business, seeking training, or simply resting.

The Observer Research Foundation estimates that enhancing women’s labor force participation could increase India’s GDP by 27% – but this potential remains locked behind the absence of care infrastructure. Investing in that infrastructure is not charity; it is sound economic policy.

Legal recognition and social protection 🔗

Formalizing Lakshmi’s stall through accessible licensing processes would give her legal protections, reduce her vulnerability to eviction and harassment, and potentially open doors to government welfare schemes she currently cannot access. UN Women’s framework on gender-equitable inclusive growth emphasizes that policy measures need to go beyond access to economic resources and must actively address the legal and normative conditions that limit women’s participation. For a woman like Lakshmi, this means recognition not just as a vendor, but as a worker, a caregiver, and an economic actor deserving of the same protections the formal economy offers others.

Community networks as an economic resource 🔗

Lakshmi’s social connections – fellow vendors, neighbors, community groups – are often her primary safety net in the absence of formal support. Studies on the psychosocial and economic well-being of street vendors find that strong social networks contribute to financial resilience by providing access to informal loans and shared resources, as well as emotional support that buffers against the mental health toll of economic precarity. Strengthening community structures, particularly women’s collectives and vendor associations, can amplify these effects and give women like Lakshmi a collective voice in policy discussions that currently happen without them.

Why Lakshmi’s story matters beyond Lakshmi 🔗

Lakshmi is not an exceptional case. She represents a pattern – one replicated across informal markets in India, across South Asia, across the Global South. Women who serve as their family’s primary earner while also serving as primary caregiver, who operate in the informal economy without legal recognition or financial access, who work harder than most and advance less than most. Understanding her story is not an exercise in sympathy. It is an exercise in understanding how gender, disability, informality, and economic policy intersect to create conditions that are both unjust and economically inefficient.

The World Bank has demonstrated that enabling women’s fuller economic participation does not just benefit women – it raises household incomes, improves children’s outcomes, and drives broader economic growth. The barriers Lakshmi faces are not natural features of her situation. They are the product of policy gaps, institutional failures, and social norms that can – and must – be changed.

What would it take for Lakshmi’s stall to become not just a survival mechanism, but a foundation for genuine economic security? The answer is not one intervention. It is a combination: flexible credit, accessible training, care support, legal recognition, and a community that sees her work as worthy of respect and protection.

What do you think? If you were designing a support program for women like Lakshmi who are both informal workers and primary caregivers, which constraint would you prioritize addressing first – and why? And do you think the social stigma women face in public commercial spaces is more of a personal barrier or a structural one?

References

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