August 2007 Edition
Vidya Viswanathan
New Delhi
THE Mesh shop in Delhi’s Uday Park stocks some stylishly designed handicraft products from across India. It is a wide range: a stuffed elephant in a skirt, chic bead napkin rings, a beautifully hand-carved wooden chopping board, wooden lamps hanging from the ceiling and much more. The shop has been funded by IM Soir, a Swedish company, to conduct a four-year design and development project. Rishikesh, an alumnus of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) has been working with various groups giving them design inputs. Maximizing Employment to Serve the Handicapped or its better known abbreviation, Mesh, has been around for 25 years. Most of the products in its shop have been made by groups of physically challenged people across the country. However, Mesh has changed its charter to include products from the able- bodied too.
Mesh is a fair-trade company which keeps a 15
per cent mark-up and exports these products to
fair-trade organisations across the world.
Mesh’s stated goal is to provide opportunities for
disabled people and their dependents, especially
those affected by leprosy so that they can become
self-sufficient. So the organisation trains people to
produce goods suited to their capabilities. It assists
groups in obtaining raw material and developing
cost sheets which include fair-trade wages for artisans
as well as overheads and profits. It also helps
in maintaining quality control and securing orders.
The design project, for example, addressed coding schemes and how to reduce costs so that they
could produce a product at a given price.
Mesh is also open to audits. A Finnish fair-trade
company audited the Bethany Leprosy Colony in
Andhra Pradesh and found wages paid on a piece-bypiece basis. Mesh then worked with the colony and
the suppliers and redesigned the products and the
worksheet. “Women tape weavers and other workers
are to be given a 50 per cent increase in piece rate
payments – in direct response to the observations
made by a delegation of Fair Traders from Finland,”
reads a news piece on the Mesh website.
“We did a turnover of Rs 1.3 crore last year and 95 per cent of that came from exports. Still a modest turnover, but we are just eight of us doing everything,” laughs Jacqueline Bonney, the executive director of Mesh. Bonney trained as a nurse in Britain before coming to India in 1978. Mesh projects are self-sustaining but they look for donations for capital expenses. “We still have not learnt how to manage that,” explains Bonney. Mesh was started by five expatriate American women who wanted to work with a leprosy colony in Faridabad. The husband of one of the women worked with the FAO and he wanted to promote broiler chickens. So these women taught the colony how to grow broiler chickens. Then they brought the chickens back to their kitchen, cleaned and chopped them and delivered them to the expatriates. Bonney herself worked with a leprosy colony in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. As a nurse, she realised that they could not help the families unless they found a way of generating income. The husband went off begging to faraway places leaving a pregnant wife to beg nearby. Bonney and her group could not give her medicines unless she had something to eat.
The group had to find a self-sustaining trade for the village. They looked around to see if anyone had a sellable skill. One of the residents was a tape weaver who wove beds. Bags were made out of the tapes and exported. “The fair-trade movement was new to Britain in 1981,” recollects Bonney. According to her, leprosy colonies are an example of how to organise groups. “These colonies are way ahead. They are uneducated, but even in the sixties they had registered themselves as societies. They have land, electricity and water,” she says. In Bethany, at an early stage, the entire unit joined the government’s Provident Fund Scheme in which the management contributes 13.61 per cent and the artisans contribute 12 percent of their income, which is then saved with interest of 8.5 per cent and will result in a pension on retiring. In 1995, Bonney felt she had become a mother figure in the village. She moved to Delhi to work at Mesh. Mesh started working with able bodied people because the children who grew up in these colonies, married children from other colonies and needed a profession. K Shyamala, a girl who grew up in the village that Bonney had worked in, is now studying design at the South Delhi Polytechnic and is funded by IM Soir. Mesh today works with other handicapped people – both institutions and individuals – too.
The list includes at least 60 groups across the country. Each group works on different products. For example, Mesh works with the Hubli Hospital for the handicapped in Karnataka from where they source wood carving, block printing, calendars, greeting cards and toys. The rehabilitation unit there holds workshops and trains people. “A woman from an affluent Gujarati household was born without hands. She comes to the unit in Hubli and paints with her feet,” says Bonney. Recently Mesh worked with the leprosy mission on a programme called Economic Empowerment of Artisans with Disability (EEAD). The project started in Vadathorasalur, Tamil Nadu by identifying disabled traditional artisans and the people affected by leprosy, and then linking them to Mesh for product development and marketing. They identified a carpenter who was affected by polio. Though his family wanted him to do something else he wanted to do carpentry, but was not able to get any work. So Mesh worked with him by making small wooden articles like pencil boxes and crosses on a plinth. Bonnie recollects the length that they have to go to make sure that orders are executed. This carpenter got embroiled in a civil case and was locked up and had to go to court in the middle of an order. A nearby church hosted him so that he could finish his work. After that his family was convinced that he was on to something productive.
Even though fair-trade as an idea has caught on in the West, Bonney feels that women shoppers want to pay less. So her dream project is to implement a fair-wage calculator software developed at Berkeley. It measures artisans’ wages against four parameters. It takes into account the time and cost for each process. It takes into account what the artisan gets paid, the minimum wage in that country, the minimum wage in that state and the no poverty wage in the US. For each product sold anywhere in the world this would be available. “This would also help artisan groups to understand what they need to do to decrease effort and increase productivity. They could remove a couple of studs or put in one less flower,” says Bonney. She has already identified a girl, a post-graduate from one of the leprosy colonies to implement the project. Bonney’s plea to shoppers across the world is to understand that their shopping decision can make a big difference somewhere in the world. One more child could get medicines or go to school.
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