Standing Tall

The story of Prema is truly awe inspiring. A self-made entrepreneur, she runs an embroidery workshop in Mullaikulathur all on her own. She has trained the women of the village to help her in the activity and has in-turn provided livelihood to many such young women. 

The story is inspiring because of the circumstances under which she started handling the business. Coming from a family of traditional weavers, she learnt the art from her husband and father-in-law. Her husband ran the business successfully after the death of her father-in-law until fate claimed his life too. In dire-straits not knowing what to do, Prema turned back to the only occupation she knew- embroidery.

She talks of tough times. Learning the ropes of business has been tough, knowing a skill and using it to run a business are not the same.Prema struggled to keep the business running.With nobody to meet regular customers and take orders, the orders drastically reduced. Prema syas that it was also partially due to the emergence of machine embroidery- being faster and cheaper, it ate into Prema’s customer base. With depleting incoming work, she had to cut down on the workforce.

Currently she works from a makeshift workshop situated in a hut in Mullaikulathur, lent by relatives. From an initial workforce of 20 they are now down to 7. The women working for Prema are also from marginalized families – many of them from the backward class. This income forms a part of their livelihood.

But Prema has not given up. She says that the past 7-8 years has made her strong and resilient. What kind of hand embroidery can she do? Thread work, chamki work, jhardoshi…she rattles off. She is now confident of handling any kind of handmade embroidery work.

She plays multiple roles – getting orders, designing the patterns, buying the raw materials and delivering the finished products. She travels all the way to Chennai to get orders to keep the workshop going. Now she survives on orders from the nearby Anupuram settlement and Kalpakkam although it is not of much quantity.

So how does she price her work? Her math is simple –its purely based on the labour required for each piece. She no longer gets work from the wholesale dealers in Chennai due to their demand for extremely low rates. She is confident of scaling up if more work emerges.Even in the midst of all this Prema is willing to teach the art to the women in nearby villages.When adversity strikes you have only two choices- get bogged down by it or stand tall and fight it out. Prema obviously chooses well.

Entrepreneurship anyone?

The word entrepreneurship frightens even the best brains in B-schools -they find secure corporate jobs better than to take the entrepreneurship gamble. What makes this story truly remarkable is the fact that this lady took to entrepreneurship with little or no basic knowledge but with a lot of confidence.

Meet Kala, the ward councillor of the SC ward in Mullaikulathur and an entrepreneur who runs the only shop in that part of the village.Kala received some money from Hand-in-Hand, an NGO providing microfinance and used that to set up her petty shop. 

She sells essential items and sweet-meats and makes a living out of it.Kala being a ward councellor also talk about the state of her ward.She points out to the state of the roads and rues at the lack of sanitation.During the rainy season the place floods and people can hardly commute.

Nearly around 50-75 families reside in the SC colony. Kala also points out the need for a doctor. The men work as coolie workers and daily labourers who do not have any fixed income. If they need money then they go to work .Alcoholism also seems to be rampant with everyone spending most of their earnings on it.

Why has no one else taken the entrepreneurship route when finance is available? Kala says that people borrow money and spend it on their household expenses. There have been instances of a woman starting an idly shop and some have also bought cows from the money. Kala points out to Prema who runs an embroidery workshop in the colony and says that many women from the SC colony are employed there.

We call it a land of men, but clearly in Mullaikulathur, the women seem to be ruling the roost.

Agent of Change

Sumathi heads the women’s self-help group in Mullaikulathur. The group consists of nearly 30 women from different sections of the village. 

Sumathi coordinates with Hand in Hand, an NGO in microfinance and helps provide funding for women who want to start their own enterprise. Many women in the self-help group have used the money to buy cows. They sell the milk to the local milkman. Sumathi worries that many who borrow end up spending the money on household expenses.

She is an opinion leader in the village and commands a lot of respect from her self help group. Sumathi has also brought a number of NGO initiatives to the village. She talks about a health camp that she conducted with an NGO. She has also helped in disbursing the funding available for building toilets and has built a number of toilets in the village.

Sumathi actively participates in all village activities and takes special interest in ensuring that all children are sent to school .She is looking for trainings in agriculture-based activities that can be managed from within the home. She aims to empower the women to contribute to the household income, thus elevating their standard of living.

Two different worlds

Farmers here grow two crops every year. The second  set of crops will be sown now .With the rain gods being benevolent this year with heavy rainfall over the last few weeks, everyone in Mullaikulathur is gearing up for the busiest part of the agriculture cycle.

 The fields are being readied to sow the crops. Large fields are usually segregated into smaller areas where the sowing is done, segment by segment. The crop to be sown is first grown in a separate plot. On the day of sowing, the two week-old crops are uprooted in bunches and carried to the fields to be sown.

The field is readied by ploughing and water logging. Bigger farms use tractors and the smaller farms use motor-driven ploughs which need to be guided by hand. The old world oxen-driven ploughs is no longer used and finds a place only in Indian movies.

The well to do farmers and the other smaller farmers seem to exist in different worlds altogether. While the richer agriculturist use more sophisticated tools to minimize labour and maximize productions, the others still depend on manual labour to do the bulk of the farm work. The sowing season makes this contrast very evident. Thandavamurthy has a sowing machine which he uses to plant the rice saplings. The machine can be operated by even a child and it helps him drastically reduce on labour.

He procured the sowing machine because of the government subsidy reducing its cost to Rs.75000.The rice saplings are fed to the machine which then plants the saplings with exact spacing with almost no labour cost.

In the adjacent farm one can see the traditional way of sowing the paddy. The men prepare the field and stack up bunches of rice saplings.It is the women who sow the saplings. A small field employs around  10-15 women to plant the saplings.This is also the only means of income for most of these women.

One wonders whether there is any merit in using farm equipment meant for countries like America and Australia - where there is a serious dearth of labour – in India. On one hand we are trying to reduce unemployment through various government schemes and on the other we encourage use of farm equipment to reduce labour. It is in the midst of such ironies that we in India live.