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Honey bee publish details |
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Challenge |
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| Title |
In Search of Succour |
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Kundan (Jewellery) Cottage Industry The enterprise is widely popular in Lucknow and surrounding areas. To give a good shape and the desired design to Kundan ornaments (artificial jewellery), the process of heating the gum is required to be repeated quite frequently. In the process, women repeatedly use the fire-oven, creating two basic problems. It raises the temperature of their bodies and causes waist pain. The women feel that there is a need to change the shape and size of the older oven.
Batua Cottage Industry In the Chhatarpur district of Madhya Pradesh, fashioning batuas (small purses) is a very popular cottage industry. In this job women mostly use hard textural cotton cloth. To give shape to the batua, women first cut the cotton by scissors in a longitudinal direction. This repetitive exercise results in arm muscles being unduly stretched. After some time their hands lose the capacity to perform hard physical work. Women are keenly interested in a feasible innovation in order to overcome this problem.
Challenges in the Handicrafts Industry
Lucknawi work The Lucknawi or chikan school of cloth designing is a collaborative process with four to five persons at work on each kurta or dress shirt. It is highly intricate work and one worker takes two days per piece. The returns are low, though – only about Rs 10-12 per kurta. Moreover, workers are quite frequently subject to eye-strain and backache. The introduction of machines has led to higher output in the short term. But machines create problems too, with the thread breaking quite often and it not being easy to reset the machine again and again.
Zardozi work A large number of children are employed in the zardozi sector, besides women. Between 50, 000 to 60, 000 workers are involved in zardozi work in Ahmedabad alone. In this school of work, women mostly use a large-sized iron frame for creating the design and subsequently the desired shape of the piece of cloth is fashioned. The job requires a high degree of attention to detail as a false stitch could undo the embroidery and, as a result, is fraught with problems. Mostly, the job is performed under dark indoor conditions since women are not allowed by their husbands to work outside, either in the verandah or in the front of the house. Therefore bulb light or lamp light is needed. Setting the light source on the front side of the frame causes major problems to the eye. The reflection of the light results in eye diseases, while the positioning of the source behind the workers creates problems of inadequate light. The outcome is poor in both cases. A large number of workers take to wearing spectacles within a few years of taking up the embroidery work. Room for a social innovation, perhaps.
Silk Cottage Industry
In Bihar, silk cottage industries are widely popular and usually run by women. Women use their thighs and fingers to give shape to the thread, badly scrapping the skin of their thighs and fingers. The women lose their physical efficiency as a result. They need immediate remedies.
Agarbatti or Incense sticks
There are around 25,000 to 30,000 women working in the incense stick industry in Ahmedabad. Each woman makes 5,000 sticks of agarbatti daily and earns about Rs 35 for it. A mixture prepared out of coal dust, imli seed powder, chemicals, essence, glue, oil and water is rolled around the stick by the worker using her hands. Owing to the continual action of rolling the material on to the stick by hand, the skin on the hands of the worker gets scraped-off. Over the years, the skin thins from the scraping and is likely to start bleeding at the slightest irritation. A host of other problems plague workers making incense sticks including cough, difficulty in breathing, weakness in the eyes and backache brought about by crouching throughout while rolling the stick in the mixture. Some workers have tried using hand-gloves while working but that did not work out as the end product was of poor quality. The dilemma: how to protect one’s hands while making good quality sticks?
Bidi
Bidis, cheap unfiltered cigarettes rolled in dry leaves, are made of tendu leaves (Coromandel ebony persimmon/ Diospyros melanoxylon) and tobacco. Again, the bidi-making process is time-consuming, with tendu leaves first being soaked overnight in water. In the morning, the leaves are cut and mixed with tobacco and then rolled up and tied. The tendu leaves that they are being supplied with not being of a very high quality, workers are forced to waste a good deal of the leaves while making the bidis. The major veins of the tendu leaves are also removed because they are perceived as waste material. Since waste of leaves means waste of money, the workers want to put the thread or organic manure from the waste organic material to use. They have not been able to do that so far owing to lack of skills/ tools/ technology. This is one. Also, the cost to health is high, with bidi-makers suffering from various illnesses caused by the nicotine content in tobacco. These include breathing difficulties, eye-related problems, and nicotine-related TB and cancers.
Papad or Fritters
The art of making papad (dry fritter to be fried) is a delicate and time-consuming process. Ingredients such as pulses, pepper and soda powder are mixed with water, and kneaded into a dough into which a little oil is poured. This dough is at first flattened, then smoothened, and finally rolled into still thinner pieces with a roller-pin. The workers face the problem of swelling in their palms, which reduces their efficiency. The weather, too, plays a role in the making of papad, which have to be left out in the sun to dry. Too much sun and it dries in excess and becomes brittle; too little and it does not dry enough. A mild early morning sun is believed to be ideal for drying. Workers receive a mere Rs 5 or so per kg. Given the effort that goes into the making, a worker can rarely prepare more than two or three kilos of papad per day. The process is long and painful, and machinery that replaces these workers instead of aiding them threatens to rob the workers of their livelihood. Is there an alternative to pain and replacement? |
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| Volume No. |
Honey Bee, 13(3): 12-13, 2002 |
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