When a dentist in Amritsar casually says she also manages a gas station, it means something that normal economic data doesn’t show. Shinjini Kumar’s Busy Women: Building Commerce and Culture in Middle India tells the stories of women entrepreneurs in 30 tier-2 cities in India.
After 30 years in finance, including at the RBI, she spent three years mapping how women in “middle India” start enterprises.
Her discovery challenges conventional inequality narratives: although India’s economic middle has shrunk, tier-2 cities are creating entrepreneurial vigour that traditional measures miss. Anyone interested in India’s economic opportunities — especially those who are building for middle and mass markets — should read this book.
Shinjini’s link to “middle” spaces — cities, institutions, and economic classes — shapes the book’s core argument.
After 30 years of liberalisation, consumption is split between luxury items and volume commodities. The narrative had become about billionaires or MGNREGA payments, missing what was happening in the middle. Shinjini explores businesses in 30 cities between India’s metros and rural areas, finding that understanding how women navigate constraints in these places unlocks entrepreneurial patterns.
How women move
In her first chapter, ‘Women, Money, and Cities’, she explains how women in tier-2 India participate differently. Men move for work, following job openings and networks. Women move for marriage without connections, confined by the “tethered cow” phenomenon limiting independence within families.
I was really interested in the Amritsar chapter. Despite annual pilgrimages to this sacred city, the chapter revealed overlooked dynamics about why physical and social infrastructure matter more than we think. Wide roads and family-supported women entrepreneurs signal wealth, but digital and physical infrastructure has enabled women’s economic participation in ways unimaginable a generation ago.
Shruti Khurana’s journey is revealing. From an IAS aspirant, she went on to start a hospitality business. She got married young and turned the family farmhouse into a weekend café. Elgin Café’s success in September 2020 turned a passion into a real business, and by 2023, she had quickly expanded to four locations. Or take Himani Arora who pivoted from biochemistry to fashion design after returning from the US.
Dr. Simarpreet Sandhu runs both a gas station and a hospital with Punjab’s first radiation machine. The environment actively encourages this kind of diversity. What makes Amritsar stand out is the obvious support from families and the wealthy base of educational institutions that churn out women professionals.
The city doesn’t have as many factories as nearby industrial hubs, but entrepreneurs may use networks like Phulkari, which is a platform for women business owners. This is a distinct kind of infrastructure — social capital that makes it cheaper for women who have lost professional networks post marriage.
Amritsar is just one stop on Shinjini’s 30-city journey, where family businesses thrive. Manufacturing drives Coimbatore. Patna and Varanasi face different struggles entirely. What works in one place fails in another because history, industrial roots, and who-you-know networks shape everything — patterns GDP numbers completely miss.
Shinjini’s in-depth, city-by-city documentation shows these differences that econometric models group into broad categories.
The book further reveals what aggregate data conceals well. National data indicate that fewer women are working, but tier-2 women are choosing to work for themselves more instead of taking up traditional jobs. Conversations on infrastructure usually revolve around roads and airports. They don’t talk about how family structures, digital payments, and physical mobility come together to create commercial opportunities.
Shinjini writes that her late mother encouraged her to be “interesting, not boring,” and the end of the book does precisely that. Her writing is a mix of data-driven analysis and humorous moments, which makes it easy to understand complicated economic patterns.
Pointer to politicians
But the most essential thing is to show politicians how to look beyond the numbers. It is not just Bengaluru’s IT parks or Mumbai’s financial district that drives India’s economy. Most economic studies don’t look at these hundreds of stories from 30 towns.
The book asks important questions regarding how we measure success in the economy. GDP growth counts the money that hospitals make, but it doesn’t count the social capital that makes these kinds of businesses possible. Statistics on employment count women who leave corporate positions as dropouts, not as entrepreneurs who create new jobs. Financial inclusion measures keep track of bank accounts, but they don’t check to see if women really have influence over the money that goes through them.
Shinjini’s documentation shows the need for improved frameworks to comprehend tier-2 economic dynamism. We’ll keep overlooking how the middle is genuinely growing unless policymakers see this India.
(The reviewer is a consultant in the fintech and payments space)
Check the book out on amazon.
Title: Busy Women: Building Commerce and Culture in Middle India
Publisher: Penguin Business
Published on March 1, 2026
