$20 to $192M: Filling the gap no one else wanted
How a global model was built by solving a problem markets ignored
In 1959, seven women in Mumbai pooled ₹80 (less than US$20 in today’s money) to start a small food business from a shared rooftop. They had no premises, no equipment, and no outside backing.
Sixty-six years later, Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad is a 45,000-member worker cooperative with ₹1,600 crore (~US$192M) in annual turnover, exporting products to 25+ countries. Governments from Uganda and beyond have sent delegations to study what they have done.
One decision drove that success. They decided to accept no donations and no external investment. Every member is a co-owner with an equal share in profit and loss, and that structure has held through every financial crisis and growth challenge in the 66 years since.
This is Soft Power solving a Hard Problem. It is also a lesson in how to scale a solution without external capital, political backing, or a famous founder.
The Hard Problem
A Hard Problem is one that affects millions or billions of people. It can be stated in one sentence, and it sits in a gap that neither markets nor governments will fill - markets because it is not profitable enough, governments because it requires commitments that cross borders and decades.
Lijjat’s Hard Problem is women’s economic exclusion. Can a worker-owned business, with no hierarchy, no external capital, and no male ownership, lift women out of poverty at scale and compete with multinationals while doing it?
Yes, and they have been doing it for six decades.
The founding decision made that possible. By refusing donations from day one - including during financial crises - the cooperative’s credibility comes entirely from its own results. Every member owns the outcome. Quality and accountability are not imposed from outside. The members are the business model.
The Soft Power
Soft Power is the ability to attract others to your model rather than forcing or paying them to follow it. It operates through credibility - when what you have built is specific enough, proven enough, and replicable enough that others want to be part of it. That attraction is also leverage. People join your effort, copy your model, align with your approach - and in doing so, they carry it further than you could alone. That is how Soft Power scales a solution that neither markets nor governments would fund.
Lijjat cannot force anyone to do anything. It has no political mandate and no financial leverage over other organisations.
And yet women keep joining. The cooperative has grown to 45,000 members across 82 branches in 17 Indian states not through recruitment drives or financial incentives, but because the model works and women can see it working. That is the attraction side.
The leverage side is replication. Multiple cooperatives across Indian states have modelled their governance on Lijjat’s system. Uganda sent a Vice-Presidential delegation to study it. Other international delegations have used its ownership structure as a development blueprint.
Nobody was asked, paid, or required. The model earned it. The Soft Power did the heavy lifting.
What Could Accelerate This
The world Lijjat operates in today looks nothing like 1959. That creates an opportunity it didn’t have before.
Lijjat’s quality control depends on centralised testing and physical infrastructure. That limits replication to places where Lijjat already has presence.
The opportunity is to turn that system into an AI-assisted protocol that any women’s cooperative anywhere could use - without Lijjat needing to be physically present. The governance model becomes something others can adopt and run independently.
The founding decision - self-reliance, collective ownership, and equal profit share - could reach a cooperative in Nairobi or Jakarta, running on a phone, without Lijjat ever being in the room.
To be clear, this is not about turning Lijjat into a technology organisation. It is about updating their leverage strategy to use available technology to extend their Soft Power further and faster - solving the Hard Problem beyond their current reach. And they can do this while remaining a profitable, self-reliant enterprise.
Why This Matters Now
Lijjat’s Hard Problem maps directly to SDG 5 - the UN’s goal to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls by 2030. The current prognosis is not good. With only five years remaining until the 2030 deadline, none of the targets of SDG 5 have been fully achieved. If current trends continue, the world will reach 2030 with 351 million women and girls still living in extreme poverty. At the current pace, it will take 140 years for women to be equally represented in managerial roles, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
The institutions designed to solve this are not moving fast enough. This is the gap where Soft Power can solve Hard Problems. And the conditions for it have never been better.
The tools that took Lijjat decades to build - governance architecture, replicable models, and trust at scale - can now be assembled faster. Digital infrastructure removes the need for physical presence. AI compresses timelines - the inspection, verification, and training that anchored Lijjat to specific geographies can now travel without it. Networks that once took generations to build can form in months.
The founding decision still matters. The commitment still has to be real. But the distance between a decision made on a rooftop and a model adopted in Nairobi, Jakarta, or Lagos is shorter than it has ever been.
That is what the Soft Power Index is built to document - and to make usable. To surface the pattern underneath these organisations clearly enough that someone else can build it faster to scale impact.
The questions are the same ones Lijjat answered in 1959. Today, there are new tools, technologies, and talent available to answer them.
A Note on the Index
Lijjat is currently ranked 11th on the Soft Power Index - 7.9 on Soft Power, 8.3 on Hard Problem Focus. I didn’t find it. It was contributed by Mukesh Gupta, who recognised it as the kind of organisation the index was built to surface.
This is the point of the Index being open. Organisations like Lijjat exist around the world - doing serious work, building proof at scale, yet rarely making it into mainstream leadership conversations, investment decisions, or founder strategies.
If you know one, tell us.
Today is International Women’s Day. It is hoped that this article shows that women founders and leaders have always had the ambition and agency to build meaningful solutions to Hard Problems. What has changed is access to the tools to do it.
Lovable - the platform the Soft Power Index is built on, entirely by me - is free for 24 hours today. I am not a developer. The Index and everything you see at softpowerindex.lovable.app was built using Lovable (over the past week).
If you have an idea, today is a good day to start.
This is an inspiring story, especially to read on International Women’s Day. It makes me reflect on the kind of leadership needed to activate and amplify soft power. I imagine it requires the ability to think beyond widely accepted frameworks and models, and the courage to envision something different. And of course, the inner strength to stay with that vision when challenges appear and the dominant power structures of the world insist, “That will never work.” I’m looking forward to learning more about soft power and how it can be applied in leadership.