Bengaluru: It’s amazing, really, how long we can live in a place, call it home and have absolutely no idea how many wonderful things there are to discover about it. Over the last month, Whitefield Rising, a community-controlled Facebook page, was peppered with photographs of beautifully designed, colourful bags. A closer look revealed that they were all made from old tetrapacks that had been snatched off their route to the landfill and woven together. What’s more, they had been made by local women, most of them domestic workers and wives of construction labourers. The people of Whitefield now go there whenever they want to buy a gift – it ensures that the women who make the bags earn some money.
The initiative, it turns out, is Joy at Work, headed by Devika Krishnan. Eleven enterprising women finish their morning chores, drop their children off at school and head to the workspace, where they weave tetrapacks to make bags and scrap fabric to make colourful bits of jewellery. Joy at Work is only two years old and is still being handheld by Krishnan, who has been in the crafts sector for over two decades. “I work on projects that are in the livelihood and craft-based sector,” she explained. The women are trained in these crafts, taught how to work with colour and mentored until the enterprise is on its feet. After that, the business is run by these women themselves, leaving Krishnan free to cultivate her next group.
Many women across the country have gained a great deal from Krishnan’s model, but she shies away, rather emphatically, from the word ‘activist’. “I facilitate,” she insists. “You teach a child to read, but you can’t really claim credit if he goes on to become a great poet.”
“I started out with Dastkar in Delhi and Ranthambore,” said Krishnan, who graduated from the National Institute of Design in 1992. In Ranthambore, where she continues to pitch in, she began training women who lived around the tiger reserve, giving them a livelihood of their own. That’s where she began working with tetrapacks, for the villagers there had no solid waste management system.
“In 1989, many people were relocated when the government cordoned off 400 km for the reserve. They have a weaving tradition of their own, using a local reed,” said Krishnan. She learnt the weave from a little girl living there and made the connection with tetrapacks. “These go into landfills, so we’re dealing with two issues in a big way.”
Krishan also runs Shepherd Crafts, an initiative in Kashmir that is aimed at reviving the skills of the Gujjar and Bakarwal community. When she returned to Bengaluru, she was offered a contract with an NGO here, to work with a community of women in one of the city’s worst slums in Janakiram Layout. “We would collect tetrapacks from Christ University, to which the NGO was affiliated,” Krishnan explained. These were cleaned and used to make sturdy little baskets, simply because it was the cheapest, strongest material to which they had access.
That’s how ANU Spandana, or the ‘Anu Unit’, as Krishnan calls it, began. Today, it runs on its own steam, with the women in the slum figuring out design, sorting out raw material and overseeing the work. Even with Joy at Work, Krishnan ensures that everything is flexible – the success of the unit depends entirely on the work put in by the women. Work hours are flexible keeping in mind her employee demographic.
“The women’s husbands usually want to check the place out for themselves before their wives begin work. Fortunately, the men are okay with it, as long as home is top priority for the women,” she said.
Building a dedicated team is of utmost importance and it’s rarely easy. Although a number of women seem interested at first, many of them change their minds when they realise it actually means work and not a free run over the supplies. Waste is a strict no-no. Every single bit of material that is left over finds its way into a new product. “I have about nine very dedicated women at the Joy of Work project, who are being trained in different skills,” she said. These women will form the core team, to train others as the business grows.
Krishnan cannot abide the thought of people buying their products simply because they feel sorry for the women who make them. “If any of our products has a defect, it will be blown up. I want customers to choose our products because they are the best.”
Giving people a livelihood is one thing, but as Krishnan soon found, many of these women go home to alcoholic husbands who are waiting eagerly for what their wives bring. “I open bank accounts for all the women who work with me,” she said. “I also found that many of them want to send something back to their mothers in Odisha, Jharkhand or rural Karnataka. So we started opening post office saving schemes for them.” An ex-postmaster from Whitefield was called upon to talk to the women about getting schemes at the post office, to enable money transfers, which banks can’t really handle in the depths of rural India.
Some of the women become so confident with the way they speak and write English – they are taught to maintain all the registers at these units – that they go on to better prospects. “The idea is to make them responsible for themselves, whether they do something right or make a mistake. Extreme patience is necessary and they have to be handheld for about five years, but the onus, ultimately, lies with them. I'm only around to help."
