Today, I went to an exhibit of sarees (!) by a group called Dastkar Andhra. I had heard about them in various contexts before. The Andhra chapter works with weavers in villages giving them various kinds of support and input especially design input on the kinds of things that will sell in urban India. All the sarees are handlook. I had a nice chat with the lady who was in charge. Among other things they have a program to have stay-at-home women become small scale resellers of the sarees, and make some money doing so. This is not something new, but I was tempted to join in this case, since I thought what they were doing is cool. Luckily sanity asserted itself, but if you know anyone who would be a good reseller, let me know. I bought two sarees for about 500/- each, one of them was a khadi one. (Khadi refers to material created on the spinning wheel, the charka, made popular by Gandhi). An interesting thing was the bag they packed the sarees in. It was made of newspaper but done very well. The bag is very sturdy and note the ropes for carrying, the attachment holes for these to the bag is done in a sturdy clean way, lot of attention to detail. Apparently these bags are done by blind children at an orphanage in Secunderabad, and they are sold at Rs 2/- per bag. Its pretty cool. I am getting upset by how much plastic I and Priya use, but haven't yet got the discipline to carry around a cloth bag.
The lady said that they also sell to FabIndia which I have already blogged about so that was cool. They are also working on something called a 'decentralized spinning machine'. Lots of detail there which I will pass on.
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