By Purna Chandra Jena

Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal’s address to the BRICS Women-Led Development Conference in New Delhi on September 10 was framed as a nudge to partner countries; what it delivered was a specific diagnosis of three barriers women entrepreneurs face — credit, buyers and markets, and predictable rules. That specificity should shift the discourse towards numbers that can be checked, starting with India’s own.

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India’s domestic evidence is real and worth stating in relative terms alongside absolute figures. Nearly 300 million bank accounts have been opened for women — roughly three in five of India’s estimated 520 million adult women. Around 100 million rural women belong to nine million self-help groups and 30 million-plus have become “Lakhpati Didis” earning above Rs 1 lakh a year — a 30 per cent SHG-to-six-figure conversion rate. Of 560 million loans to small entrepreneurs, 68 per cent (roughly 381 million) went to women.

Here the numbers need cross-checking. Goyal cited female workforce participation at roughly 19 per cent. The PLFS’s Annual Report 2025 puts it at 40.0 per cent, up from 23.3 per cent in 2017-18. The 19 per cent figure matches the World Bank’s international estimate, not PLFS; the two define work differently, and citing the lower one understates India’s own recorded progress.

The distinction changes the message. Against PLFS’s 40 per cent, the 50 per cent target needs a 10-point, 25 per cent relative gain — credible. Against the World Bank’s 19 per cent, it needs a 31-point, 163 per cent leap — indistinguishable from rhetoric. Message one: Benchmark against India’s own statistics, or the target will look permanently out of reach when it is not.

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On market access, the speech fell back on the Jaipur Consensus, where BRICS agreed to “explore” a common trade platform and a women’s advancement fund, alongside more women-led delegations and exhibitions. But “explore” is not a mandate, a platform is not a fund, and a fund with no capitalisation number is not a financing instrument.

The scale mismatch is the clearest diagnostic. Global services trade stands at nearly $10 trillion; the ministry’s own success story was a government consignment worth roughly $100 — about one in a hundred billion. That is the policy problem stated as a fraction. Message two: Scale, not sentiment, is what the fund and platform must be built to move.

India has the macro credibility to press this. Merchandise exports grew over 15 per cent between April and August, and GDP expanded 7.8 per cent in the first quarter. But the stated ambition — $4 trillion to $30 trillion by 2047 — is a 7.5-fold expansion needing roughly 9.6 per cent annual compounding for two decades, nearly two points above even this year’s pace. Message three: The workforce and growth targets are, arithmetically, the same.

Converting consensus into something bankable takes three moves. First, the fund needs a capitalisation target and a first-disbursement date. Second, the trade platform needs mutual recognition of standards and simpler documentation, since paperwork keeps small exporters off buyer platforms more than appetite does. Third, India’s self-help-group model is the one piece BRICS partners cannot import from a G7 template; NDB local-currency lending should aim squarely at replicating it.

What the Jaipur Consensus needs next is a number attached to a date — the fund’s first cheque, the platform’s first mutual-recognition agreement, and a public commitment to benchmark progress against PLFS’s 40 per cent. That is the real test of whether Bharat Mandapam’s words travel any further than the room in which they were spoken.

The writer is an economic advisor in the Chief Minister’s office, Government of Uttarakhand. Views are personal