By Shaifalika Panda, Founder & CEO, Bansidhar & Ila Panda Foundation (BIPF)
“Women’s entrepreneurship is no longer about participation alone; it is about ownership, scale and leadership. The Union Budget 2026–27 takes a decisive step in this direction by explicitly enabling women to move from credit-linked livelihoods to becoming owners of enterprises. The proposal to establish Self-Help Entrepreneur (SHE) Marts as community-owned retail platforms marks a structural shift in how women-led businesses are integrated into markets, value chains and formal retail ecosystems.
By combining innovative financing, collective ownership models and cluster-level aggregation, the Budget recognises that sustainable women entrepreneurship requires more than access to loans—it requires access to markets, branding and institutional support. This approach builds on the success of grassroots programmes while creating pathways for women entrepreneurs to scale, formalise and compete.
For States like Odisha, where women play a pivotal role in self-help groups, micro-enterprises, agro-processing and handicrafts, such interventions can unlock significant economic and social dividends.
As India advances towards Viksit Bharat, empowering women as entrepreneurs and business owners is not just a social imperative; it is an economic necessity. The Budget’s emphasis on women-led enterprises reinforces the idea that inclusive growth is most powerful when women are positioned at the centre of India’s economic transformation.”
