Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad: It's A Women-Only Business

The story of Lijjat offers an opportunity to challenge students to think about what a business is for. It can be used to explore students’ cultural intelligence starting point and discover what they need to learn from others who are different from them. The material lends itself to explore the concepts of missions, visions, values, strategies, and goals in the context of a highly successful business in India. For many years, members of the same family—mothers, daughters, sisters, and mothers-in-law—worked side by side producing Lijjat papads in India. All had started out underprivileged. Lijjat existed to improve the quality of each woman’s life. Yet Lijjat was a business and market leader. President Swati R. Paradkar knew it had to continue to grow and was unwilling to do so at the expense of what made the organization unique—it was built on the labor of women who had little except a desire for self-dignity. Paradkar and her team had plans to increase production by opening facilities in nonmetro regions that suited the company’s business model. But what would they do about replicating the model outside of India?