INTRODUCTION
Women’s collective social enterprises supported by the Self-Employed Women’s Association,
SEWA, see government linkages as a crucial way of growing their businesses and providing
livelihoods to women workers of the informal economy. In line with this, SEWA Bharat and
SEWA Cooperative Federation, two organisations of the SEWA Movement, have been working
to connect our cooperatives and collective social enterprises with the government, to get them
recognised and enable access to arange of resources,schemes and programmes.One way in
which this is done is through registration with various ministries,and in this case,specifically the
Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).
The Udyam registration portal has been a boon to MSMEs who are now able to register online
with the help of PAN/GST numbers and one-time passwords (OTPs). The earlier registration
process was complicated and required the submission of physical/scanned documents. The
integration with existing government systems like PAN and GSTIN makes a much more
convenient user experience than scanning and uploading documents.
