Women Run the Northeast's Economy and Get None of the Credit
In Imphal, thousands of women run Ima Keithel, one of Asia's largest women-run markets — a clue the region's startup story ignores. Across the Northeast, women aren't participants in the economy; they're its operators. So the highest-leverage move isn't inventing new founders — it's resourcing the ones already trading. But matrilineal isn't matriarchal: commercial power hasn't reliably become capital, ownership, or a seat where decisions get made. The founders aren't missing. The ecosystem just keeps looking past them.
In the heart of Imphal sits a market run entirely by women — thousands of them, across generations, trading everything from vegetables to textiles to household goods. Ima Keithel, the "Mother's Market," is centuries old and often called the largest women-run marketplace in Asia. It is not a curiosity or a cultural photo-op. It is a functioning commercial institution, and it is a clue to something the region's economic story almost entirely omits: across much of the Northeast, women are not participants in the economy. They are its operators.
The pattern runs well beyond one market. In Meghalaya's Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia societies, lineage and inheritance pass through women. Across the region, market trade, small enterprise, farming, and household economies lean on women's labour and decision-making to a degree that would startle much of mainland India. By almost any measure of on-the-ground economic activity, women here carry a share the national average doesn't come close to. And yet open any report on the region's "startup ecosystem," its founders, its future, and you'll find the same narrow cast: young men, apps, pitch decks. The people actually running the region's commerce are missing from the story about the region's commerce.
This isn't just an oversight of representation; it's a strategic blind spot. If women are already the region's most active traders and entrepreneurs, then the highest-leverage economic intervention isn't recruiting a new class of founders — it's giving the existing ones the tools they've been denied. Credit that reaches market-women instead of routing around them. Aggregation and logistics built for the enterprises women already run. Formal recognition of businesses dismissed as "informal" precisely because a woman runs them from a stall rather than a man from an office. The talent isn't absent and waiting to be created. It's present and waiting to be resourced.
But honesty requires a hard qualifier, because it's easy to slide from "women run the economy" into a flattering myth of a feminist utopia. Matrilineal is not the same as matriarchal. Inheritance through the female line doesn't automatically mean women hold political power, and the market-woman with commercial authority may still have little say in the institutions that govern her. Economic centrality has not reliably translated into ownership, capital, or a seat where decisions get made — and celebrating the former while ignoring the latter lets everyone off the hook.
So the real story isn't "the Northeast has already solved gender." It's that the region has an enormous, proven, under-resourced base of women running real commerce — and an ecosystem narrative that keeps looking straight past them to invent the founders it already has.