Grassroot Innovation from and for weavers

We admire innovations like iPod, TV on mobile etc for our entertainment. It is doubtful, even one person might have heard about iPod in the village that I visited last week. Still, there is innovation in that village. This is more to do for their livelihood.

I have got an oppurtunity to visit T-Ramanathpuram, village near usilampatti to check the progress of a grassroot Innovation. I went along with a NIF (National Innovation Foundation) Coordinator. It was nice meeting with him and learnt many activities of NIF on my travel.

T-Ramanathpuram is peculiar village where half of the population speaks Telugu and other half speaks Kannada besides Tamil. Weaving is the main livelihood option for this villagers. They are registered to some silk societies in Madurai/Kumbakonam/other cities. Society people would give specifications for sarees to weave based on customers taste and feedback through some agents. The agents being mediators between the society and weavers provide specifications, threads for manufacturing etc. Weavers do their job perfectly and return back the finished goods to agents and collect their labour cost. They are paid around 200 bucks per saree. It will take three days to weave a saree after the base thread (thari) setup. If it is a double border saree, two person would be needed for three days and they both has to share the 200 bucks. The second person's job is less, he would arrange the thread continuously for the border to come properly, but still his presence is needed. The second person job is called in tamil Kommai poodaradhu. Because of the need of this second person, many parents of ourprevious generation haven't sent their kids to school. They have involved them also for these tasks. Many people in this village are illiterates.

We visited a small house where a innovation for double saree weaving is installed on trial basis. There is a mechanical setup called Juccard as you see in the below figure. This is the innovation and this eliminates the need for second person. It automatically takes care of border design. Hence it improves the productivity. 6 man days effort is reduced to 2 man days effort. Wow! What an innovation for these villagers! They can now earn that 200 bucks very earlier. They can even have mulitple thari setups and earn multiple times more than current setup!



When we are interviewing the villager who uses this Juccard setup, he feels thankful to this innovation and felt that their village might have flourished well and many might have graduated if this innovation had come up some 20 years back. Better late not never, Atleast now this innovation has nurtured to this level with the help of NGOs like Honeybee, SEVA and Autonomous bodies like NIF. India shines babe!

Unfortunately, I was not able to meet the innovator. The person in photo is the user of this innovation. The innovator is from diferent part of Tamil Nadu. He came to this village, installed and trained this person.

Await to get updated on NIF and Honeybee network...