Women in India Face a Jobs Crisis. Are Factories the Solution?

Before her husband died, leaving her to raise their 2-year-old daughter alone, Sarika Pawar had never imagined working a regular job. Like her own mother and most of the women she knew in rural India, she spent her days confined to her village. Her hours were consumed with looking after her toddler, boiling water to drink and fashioning an evening meal.

But with her husband gone, eliminating his wages as a server, she was forced to earn money. She took a job at a nearby factory run by a company called All Time Plastics in Silvassa, a city about 100 miles north of Mumbai. A dozen years later, she is still there, plucking newly molded food storage containers and other household implements off a conveyor belt, labeling them and placing them in cartons bound for kitchens as far away as Los Angeles and London.

Ms. Pawar earns about 12,000 rupees per month, or roughly $150, a meager sum by global standards. Yet those wages have allowed her to keep her daughter in high school while transforming their everyday lives.

She purchased a refrigerator. Suddenly, she could buy vegetables in larger quantities, limiting her trips to the market and giving her more power to bargain for better prices. She added a stove powered by propane — liberation from the wood fire that filled her home with smoke, and an escape from the tedious work of scouring the ground for branches to set alight.

Ms. Pawar, third from right, assembling plastic hangers and adds labels at the All Time Plastics factory.