When policy meets practice: Empowering India’s women entrepreneurs
In every Budget speech, beyond the tables of numbers and fiscal arithmetic, lies a deeper story — the story of where a nation wishes to place its next generation of builders. This year, the Finance Minister’s announcement of a new SHE — Self Help Entrepreneurs scheme is one such moment. It signals a decisive belief that women should not be merely beneficiaries of development, but should be drivers of growth, architects of prosperity, and importantly, owners of enterprise.
At the Adani Foundation, we have been working based on this conviction for a long time. For over a decade, our work across India has been anchored in a simple yet powerful idea: that empowering women across their life stages creates multiplier effects that transform families, communities, and economies. This philosophy has guided our own SHE framework -Supporting Her Exponential Empowerment, which has quietly shaped programmes in education, health, nutrition, livelihoods, and leadership long before this acronym entered the policy lexicon.
That two different SHE frameworks now converge - one born in communities, the other articulated in the Union Budget - is more than a mere coincidence. It reflects a growing national consensus that women’s economic agency must sit at the heart of India’s development strategy. Our experience at the Adani Foundation has consistently shown that when women are supported not through isolated interventions but through a life-cycle approach - starting with schooling, moving through skills, access to finance, entrepreneurship, and eventually mentoring the next generation — the impact compounds.
A girl who stays in school is more likely to delay early marriage. A trained woman with market access becomes a business owner. A successful entrepreneur reinvests in her children’s education and her village’s wellbeing. This is the “butterfly effect” of empowerment: small, timely investments that unleash far-reaching social and economic change. Seen through this lens, the government’s Self-Help Entrepreneurs initiative is a natural and welcome progression.
By enabling women to move from collective savings groups to ownership of enterprises, it acknowledges what practitioners on the ground have long known, that providing credit alone is not enough. Women entrepreneurs also need skills, confidence, infrastructure, digital access, market linkages, and supportive ecosystems. They need to be treated not as peripheral actors, but as central participants in India’s growth story.
For the Adani Foundation, the Budget’s emphasis is a source of quiet affirmation. It reinforces the belief that frameworks forged through years of community engagement can inform and complement national priorities. Our own SHE approach emerged not from boardrooms but from listening to thousands of women — women farmers seeking resilient livelihoods, young girls aspiring to have professional careers, self-help group members eager to scale micro-businesses into sustainable enterprises, and community leaders determined to shape local development.
Across ports and power plants, airports and industrial corridors, the Adani Foundation’s social initiatives have worked alongside women to precisely create these pathways-supporting entrepreneurship clusters, training women in non-traditional skills, enabling access to capital, and strengthening local institutions. These efforts are not charity; they are investments in human capability. When women thrive, productivity rises, social indicators improve, and communities become more resilient to economic and climate shocks.
India today stands at a critical juncture. With aspirations of becoming a developed economy in the coming decades, we cannot afford to leave half our population on the margins of enterprise creation. Women-led businesses, particularly in small towns and rural areas. are among the country’s most under-leveraged growth engines. Unlocking their potential is not merely a matter of equity; it is smart economics. The Finance Minister deserves credit for placing women’s enterprise so firmly on the national agenda through this year’s Budget.
By elevating the Self-Help Entrepreneurs scheme as a pillar of inclusive growth, she has sent a clear signal that India’s economic future will be shaped as much by women-led businesses in small towns and rural districts as by large corporations in metropolitan centres. Budgets are ultimately statements of intent, and this one has articulated an ambition that practitioners in the field deeply share, namely that women must move from the periphery of economic activity to its very centre.
It is heartening when public policy echoes lessons learnt through years of community engagement, and even more encouraging when it provides the scale and momentum needed to carry those lessons across the nation. The alignment between grassroots frameworks like ours and national policy initiatives such as the Self-Help Entrepreneurs scheme offers a powerful template for the future. Government, philanthropy, industry, and civil society must continue to work in partnership - sharing insights, scaling what works, and ensuring that programmes reach women at every stage of their journey.
If India is to write its next chapter of growth, it will be authored not only in Parliament and Ministries, but in workshops, classrooms, village enterprises, and digital storefronts run by confident, capable women entrepreneurs. The Finance Minister’s announcement is an encouraging step in that direction. At the Adani Foundation, we remain committed to walking alongside these women — supporting their aspirations, strengthening their capabilities, and celebrating their success. The two SHEs born in different spheres now speak the same language: of ownership, of dignity, and of opportunity.
Writer is the Chairperson of the Adani Foundation-one of Asia’s premier non-profit philanthropic institutions with a $7 billion commitment and a $100 million annual outlay. Under Dr Adani’s stewardship, the Foundation has made significant strides in five key areas - education, health and nutrition, sustainable livelihoods, climate action, and community development
