|
Back
The Magic Carpet - by
Neelima Mahajan-Bansal | Jul 27, 2009
Kanni Devi’s hands work deftly
as they knot brightly coloured wool on tightly wound warp
threads. “Do taar chodd ke lagaale re; lal jhai sabaj
bachcha; kala chalta,” she sings. Her husband Chottelal, who
is working at the other end of the loom, chants, “haanji”,
in sync. It sounds like a Rajasthani folk song but is really
instructions based on the design template this carpet has.
Loosely translated, it means, “Leave two strings and then
put the red on the red; put it behind the green; and put it
right on the black.”
Kanni and Chottelal are two of the 125 carpet weavers in
Narhet, a tiny village close to Jaipur. Narhet is what local
administrators term as a “landless village”. No one here
owns land. Most belong to impoverished backward classes and
70 percent are into rug-making.
Carpet weaving is an industry associated with worker
exploitation in the popular imagination. But over the last
three years, things have changed for Kanni and Chottelal.
Chottelal, who has always lived hand-to-mouth, recently took
a Rs. 1 lakh loan to build a pukka house. He put both his
daughters in a private school, for a fee of Rs. 100 per
child. One month ago, he filed a health insurance claim —
and got Rs 1,400 — for hospital visits. He keeps his latest
acquisition, a Nokia mobile phone, under his loom. “We would
love to buy a TV too but because of the hill ranges around,
we don’t get TV signals here,” says Chottelal. Kanni wears
bright magenta lipstick now, an indulgence that was
unthinkable three years ago.
Earlier the couple used to weave carpets for contractors who
paid them Rs. 50-60 per day per person. Now they earn above
Rs. 100 a day each. The raw material is delivered to them
unlike before when they had to travel to town to get it.
Chottelal now has a better sense of carpet weaving, as he
has received rigorous training.
Like Kanni and Chottelal, scores of families in this village
have made the crossover to a better life.
Changing the Template
The soft-spoken Nand Kishore Chaudhary, founder of Jaipur
Rugs, is the person responsible for all this. Chaudhary
doesn’t speak much English and has never studied in a
business school. But the social enterprise model that he has
created for Jaipur Rugs has changed the lives of 40,000-odd
weavers in villages across 10 states in India.
Under this model, his Rs. 67.75 crore (turnover) company
engages independent weavers in far-flung villages — none of
whom are on his rolls.
The idea first came to him in 1990, when he realised that
the government was keen to promote carpet weaving in the
tribal belts of Gujarat. “The government was using
co-operative societies to develop carpet weaving in Gujarat.
But I felt that co-operatives couldn’t do this well so it
would be a great opportunity for me,” says Chaudhary. So he
relocated to Gujarat and, for eight years, developed a
weaver network there. He deputed area commanders to oversee
the existing business in Rajasthan. “We had 200 looms in
Rajasthan by then and wherever we had a concentration of 50
looms, we would depute an area commander to monitor them,
distribute raw material and supervise quality,” says
Chaudhary.
online location
|
