-RuralIndiaOnline.org It's been hard days for powerloom weavers in the city's Bazardiha cluster – with lockdowns and monsoon flooding. But it’s the UP government’s review of their electricity subsidy that has them the most worried In the narrow lanes of Bazardiha, amid the clacking sounds of Powerlooms, Wasim Akram is busy at work. He has been weaving since the age of 14 in the same two-storey brick-cement house – generations old, as...
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This Bihar weaver’s business is booming as demand for kafans rise, and he’s not a happy man -Jyoti Yadav
-ThePrint.in Jitendra Prasad, of Patwa Toli village in Bihar’s Gaya district, runs a loom from his three-storeyed house — he makes saffron shrouds, or kafans. Gaya: Swathes of saffron shrouds have been left to dry on the terrace of 50-year-old Jitendra Prasad’s three-storeyed home at Patwa Toli town in Bihar’s Gaya district. The other congested floors house raw materials and nine powerloom machines required to manufacture the shrouds. Prasad reluctantly admits that...
More »Odisha Migrant Workers Return To Gruelling Shifts, Poor Wages -Sunaina Kumar
-IndiaSpend.com New Delhi: In mid-October, machinist Bipin Ramesh Sahu, 38, was flown back to Surat from his southern Odisha village by his former employer, a textile mill owner. Sahu, among the 6.7 million migrant workers to lose their jobs and return home during the lockdown in India, assumed that his employer’s eagerness to re-employ him meant better living and working conditions in Surat--more humane shifts, safety gear, wage cheques instead of...
More »'Without khadi, I am not there' -Rahul M
-RuralIndiaOnline.org Despite the slow decline of the renowned handlooms of Dharmavaram in Andhra Pradesh, Shankara Dhanunjaya tried to work hard and prosper. But in 2016, at the age of 35, debts, crumbling dreams and crushing policy changes drove him to suicide All the handloom halls Into mortuary rooms Being metamorphosed That inexplicable sorrow! (From ‘Maggam bathuku’ an epic poem by Dr. U. Radheya, who is from a family of weavers; translated by Dr. P. Ramesh Narayana) In...
More »How Tamil Nadu's rural industry model can keep farm unrest at bay -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express Decentralised industrialisation, entrepreneurship from below have been absent in states that have seen recent unrest among agrarian communities. “The soil here is very saline with electrical conductivity value of 9. We can grow only chloride-loving crops like coconut and the MR-2 variety of mulberry.” That was Tamil Selvi, recently telling this correspondent about the 5.75-acre land farmed by her father Natarajan Gounder at Velayuthagoundanpudur, a small village around 25...
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