In 2016, soon after her wedding, Nirangkha Roy Sarkar was looking for a way to earn an income of her own while managing a new household. In a corner of her home in Tripura, she found her starting point in soft clay toys.
At first, it was small. She made decorative pieces, ornaments and gift items, selling them through neighbours, local shops and known contacts. There was no workshop, no team and no large order. There was only clay, patience and the quiet hope that her work could become something more.
Over the years, that hope took shape.
In 2022, Nirangkha opened a dedicated handicraft workshop. What had once been confined to a corner of her home now had a space of its own. The workshop allowed her to organise production, take on larger orders and think beyond what she could make alone.
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Soon, she began inviting other women artisans from her community to work with her.
Today, her enterprise creates livelihood opportunities for 14 women. Some work from home, balancing craftwork with household responsibilities, while others work from the workshop. For many of them, the work means more than an income. It has brought confidence, independence and visibility.
“What began from a corner of my home with clay and simple ideas has become work that feeds more than one household,” Nirangkha says.
A few hundred kilometres away, in Assam, Kanaklata Kalita was building a different kind of enterprise, rooted in handloom but shaped by a similar determination.
Her journey was deeply influenced by the memory of her late mother, whose strength helped hold the family together through difficult years.
“My mother never spoke big words, but her life taught me what courage looks like,” Kanaklata says.
With limited capital, Kanaklata once managed almost every aspect of her enterprise herself — from production and sourcing to marketing and sales. Like Nirangkha, she began by trying to strengthen her own livelihood. But as her work grew, it began creating space for other women as well.
For some of these women, it was the first time they were able to earn a steady income of their own.
“Maybe that is why I cannot think only about myself while building this work,” Kanaklata says.
Different geographies, same journey
The stories of Nirangkha and Kanaklata are separated by geography and shaped by different crafts, but the underlying journey is strikingly similar.
Both began with a personal need: to build an independent livelihood while navigating the responsibilities that often fall on women at home. As their enterprises grew, however, their ambitions expanded beyond their own incomes.
Their businesses became livelihood spaces for women around them — within their local communities and often within the same networks of family and social responsibilities.
Their stories are part of the Accelerating Women Micro Entrepreneurs of Northeast India programme, a 12-month initiative implemented by Nasscom Foundation, supported by L&T Technology Services and carried out in partnership with the Women Entrepreneurship Platform of NITI Aayog.
Across Assam, Meghalaya and Tripura, the programme worked with 100 women artisans in the handloom and handicrafts sector.
These women already had skills, ambition and years of experience. What they often lacked was not talent, but access to formal support — including business registration, financial planning, digital tools, branding, market linkages and mentoring.
The programme was designed to address those gaps without asking women to move away from their traditional crafts. Instead, it focused on helping them strengthen and grow the enterprises they were already building.
All 100 women began with training in digital literacy, financial planning, business registration, branding and awareness of government schemes. From this group, 50 received deeper support in product design, business planning, cash-flow management and e-commerce onboarding.
Finally, 25 women, including Nirangkha, received intensive one-on-one mentoring to help them scale their businesses across both digital and offline markets.
For Nirangkha, the support helped turn an existing craft practice into a larger business vision.
“The exposure and learning I received gave me the confidence to grow it in a bigger and better way,” she says.
For Kanaklata, training in business management and financial literacy helped bring greater structure to an enterprise she had largely managed on her own. Her growth, like Nirangkha’s, became closely linked to the progress of the women working alongside her.
Opening doors to larger markets
For individual artisans, moving from local sales to formal markets can be difficult. The programme sought to address this by creating opportunities for women entrepreneurs to understand how larger markets and institutional buyers operate.
Through a collaboration with the Northeastern Handicrafts and Handlooms Development Corporation, Nasscom Foundation submitted product samples from selected women entrepreneurs for potential collaboration. This gave participants exposure to formal procurement processes, quality standards, exhibitions and buyer-seller platforms.
Alongside this, the partnership with the Assam Institute of Management aimed to create longer-term mentoring support for women entrepreneurs across the Northeast.
Market access can open a door, but mentoring can help entrepreneurs understand how to walk through it.
For Nirangkha, the journey is still evolving. She is expanding her production in bamboo handicrafts, reaching new markets and strengthening the collaborative model that has shaped her workshop.
Kanaklata, meanwhile, continues to build her handloom enterprise around Assamese traditional attire while supporting the women who now work alongside her.
Their stories illustrate a quieter dimension of women’s entrepreneurship in the Northeast.
One woman begins by trying to earn for herself. As her work grows, it creates an opportunity for another woman, and then another. A home-based craft becomes a workshop. Personal struggle becomes shared progress. A livelihood begins to resemble a small local economy.
In Tripura, Nirangkha’s work across clay, soft toys and bamboo handicrafts now supports 14 women. In Assam, Kanaklata’s handloom enterprise carries forward the courage she says she inherited from her mother.
Their crafts and circumstances may be different, but the journey is much the same: women building something for themselves and, in the process, creating room for others to begin.
Because when a woman’s enterprise grows, it rarely stops at one household. It can become a livelihood for many.
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