This article explores the problems faced by women workers and super visors in the food processing industry in Manipur. Women employees not only play a subservient role, they are also accorded a status inferior to their male counterparts. Their subjugation can be attributed to their lack of educational qualifications, technical training, and physical capa city. Women are mostly assigned to unskilled and manual tasks, while men are given skilled and technical roles. We studied eight industries as an empirical case and supplemented our research with indepth inter views and personal communication with workers and supervisors. We found that women are excluded from the mainstream work in the units,

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Innovations from informal sectors are often left out of both policymakers' and academic discourse, and hence deprived of the attention they deserve. Almost all the innovation actions in the informal sector are derived from indigenous knowledge, which unfortunately is not explicit in innovation system framework. The process of diffusion of knowledge from one generation to another is embodied in the form of social norms and cultural practices in informal sector. Thereby, key innovations get embedded into the system without noticing. Innovations in the informal sector are complex processes and need to be understood in their context. Thus, the research work will aim to understand the informal sector innovation processes. The authors attempt to see the local ways of solving problems through studying the case of value-added products of rice in the food processing industry in Manipur through the lens of actor network theory (ANT).

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