Multiplying big brands from all over the world with
marginal migrants lined up in the corner of the streets, Connaught Place is a hub of two
contradicting realities. In the midst of the concrete structures that stand
testimony to commercial capitalism, there are splashes of ethnic crafts. Right
across the busy market of Janpath, I met Sarasvati. Soaked in sweat and glaring
at my camera, I could gather that this was not the first time she was being
clicked. She sat with a pile of golden fabric that her husband had collected
from her village in Gujarat and she came to the city expecting a good bargain. And
it is these contradictions that pose some central questions. What has been the
government’s post-independence stance on industrialisation? Have the forces of
competition and mass production unleashed by globalisation caused much harm to
the culture and crafts sector than do good to India?
Liberalisation policies meant an end to the “License
Raj”- the government loosened its protectionism over the micro industries and
it marked a shift from crafts production to mass production. Late 1960’s saw
“green revolution”, which was the exogenous push from the government which led
to prosperity on both ends. Indian economy was liberalised in 1991, and an
absence of a national policy or an agenda for the crafts sector reduced it to a
secluded sector in India’s path to development.
The Handicrafts sector holds great promise, in terms
of export potential and income and employment generation. It is estimated that
crafts sector alone can employ 25 percent of country’s population. According to
the Tenth Plan sub group report, the sector contributed around 25 percent to
the GDP of the manufacturing sector. The carpet industry in India is the
largest exporter in the world in terms of volume. Interestingly, around 50 percent
of those employed in the sector are women.
The potential of the Indian craftsmen has not been fully
tapped. Indian crafts industry has been sub-optimally employed, and the
contribution of Indian handicrafts to the world exports is merely two percent.
The multiplicity of middlemen has rendered the supply chain complex. Weaver’s suicides
in various states, specifically Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, highlight the
need for immediate government response towards tapping the sector’s immense
potential.
The government, NGO’s and cultural as well as social
entrepreneurs have a long way to go to revive the sector. A major issue is that
of cluster identification. Since the sector is majorly unorganised, the data to
categorise the clusters (as defined by the MSME industry) is unavailable and no
clear methodology is formulated.
The silver lining is that there have been
legislations and continuing efforts to secure and expand the rights of the
craftsmen effectively. The Copyright Amendment Bill 2012, which entitles
lifelong royalty to artistes and not producers, has been a step in the right
direction to protect the rights of those in the creative sector. In order to
give effective protection to Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Traditional
Cultural Expression (TCE), the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual
Property and Genetic Resources (IGC) has been working to develop a legal
mechanism under which they will be recognised as intellectual property. This
would be a landmark move as it will establish ownership of communities
inheriting particular arts, crafts, medicine, designs and motifs and protect
any kind of misappropriation by others.
Can India not have its
own model of development, as unique as its culture?
Fair trade is an internationally recognised labelling
system monitored by German-based Fairtrade International, which offers
farmers in developing nations, who comply with certain social and environmental
standards, higher than the market prices for their products in international
markets. The label serves the two way purpose- ensuring the buyer of the
quality of the product as well as ensuring better prices to the primary
producers. Indian farmers have been a part of the European fair trade from past
twenty years.
In an interesting turn of events, the Indian farmers
have launched the Fairtrade Foundation India, a strategy working in Brazil,
which aims to capture domestic market in similar manner. Application of a fair
trade model to the crafts sector, with a central labelling/certification agency
could prove instrumental in setting up permanent structures for the sector’s revival.
Drawing heavily from writings of Marx, Joseph
Schumpeter gave the concept of “creative destruction”, standing for the
hypothesis that “capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction
of some prior economic order” and paves the way for a new one. The fall of
Indian handicrafts post technocratic mass production meant the fall of an
original economic order. Revival of the crafts sector is imperative, to
acknowledge and protect the efforts of the “skilled hands”, like Sarasvati’s, which
made India incredible.
Mahima Malik
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