On 15 March, 1959, on the terrace of a modest Girgaum building called Lohana Niwas, seven Gujarati women—Jaswantiben Jamnadas Popat, Parvatiben Ramdas Thodani, Ujamben Narandas Kundalia, Banuben N Tanna, Laguben Amritlal Gokani, Jayaben V Vithalani and Diwaliben Lukka—rolled out four packets of papad. They had borrowed ₹80 from Chhaganlal Karamsi Parekh, a Servants of India Society social worker fondly remembered as Chhaganbapa, and used it to take over a loss-making papad venture. There was no business plan, only a shared vow: they would never approach anyone for donations or help, even if the venture lost money. That single principle of self-reliance over dependence became the philosophical bedrock of what grew into Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad—Lijjat meaning tasty in Gujarati.
Chhaganbapa’s most consequential advice was commercial rather than sentimental: make one papad—not a product with two qualities at two price points—and never compromise on it. But the structure built around that guidance was radical for its era and remains unusual even now. Lijjat is organised as a cooperative in which every working woman is a co-owner—a ‘sister’—sharing profit and loss equally, deciding every matter by consensus, and holding an individual veto over decisions that affect her. Men may only ever be salaried employees—accountants, drivers, security staff; never members, never owners. In a country where women’s labour inside the home has historically gone uncounted and unpaid, Lijjat inverted the equation: it turned a kitchen skill into a wage, an equity stake and a vote, at a scale few enterprises anywhere have ever matched, and decades before ‘women’s economic empowerment’ became a line in a corporate ESG deck.
Growth was incremental and entirely self-funded. Twenty-five women had joined within three months of that first batch; membership crossed 300 within three years, and the kneaded dough was soon being carried home by member-sisters across Mumbai for want of space on one terrace. Formal recognition followed: they got registered as a society in 1966, the same year the Khadi and Village Industries Commission recognised Lijjat as a village industry and extended working capital and tax exemptions, and had their first branch outside Maharashtra at Valod, Gujarat, in 1968. It was in the 1980s, though, that Lijjat’s marketing instincts sharpened—participation in trade fairs and exhibitions, advertising in vernacular newspapers, television and radio, and sponsorships timed to popular programming built the brand into a household name. The advertising spend itself was collectivised, recovered through a levy on the packaging every branch bought from Lijjat’s own polypropylene division—brand-building funded communally and reinvested rather than extracted by any single agency or promoter.
Diversification followed demand: khakhra in 1974, spice masalas in 1976, wheat atta and bakery lines by 1979, and in 1988, an unlikely leap into home care with the Sasa detergent and soap range, which within a decade accounted for roughly a sixth of the cooperative’s turnover. The papad itself now comes in more than a dozen flavours—garlic, moong, chilli, Punjabi, urad—manufactured to one standardised taste regardless of which branch makes it, a feat managed by sourcing ingredients from different regions to one centre (urad dal from Myanmar, asafoetida from Afghanistan, black pepper from Kerala and so on) and testing every batch in a Mumbai laboratory. The in-house Lijjat Patrika, published in Hindi, English, Marathi and Gujarati, has doubled for decades as both an internal communications tool and a quiet extension of the brand’s public voice.
The scale today is difficult to compress into a single figure. Around 45,000 member-sisters, spread across more than 80 branches in 17 Indian states; exports to more than 25 countries including the US, UK and the Middle East; and an annual turnover industry estimates place upward of Rs 1,600 crore—all built without institutional equity, franchise fees, or a single rupee of loan-funded expansion, since Lijjat runs on no credit at all. Every payment to every sister is settled daily.
The number that matters more than turnover, though, is the one Lijjat measures in dignity rather than rupees. Tens of thousands of women, many with no formal schooling and no independent income before Lijjat, converted a kitchen skill into lifelong economic security, a formal vote inside a functioning institution, and—through literacy classes, computer training, scholarships for their daughters, and disaster-relief housing that the cooperative has funded from its own margins after events like the 2001 Gujarat earthquake.
Six decades before women’s empowerment became a marketing category of its own, seven homemakers in Girgaum built an organisation that made womanhood—not despite domestic identity, but through it—the entire basis of ownership. Lijjat has spent 65 years selling taste. Its real product, sustained without a single outside investor, celebrates female agency at industrial scale.
