All things bright and beautiful

Rita and Umesh Anand

IT is not ever so often that someone in a speck of a village in Bodoland, on the border with Bhutan, graduates from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad.

Kirat Brahma was fishing in the pond on his family’s farm when he received the news that the premier design school would take him in as a student. 

A networked world makes many things possible. It takes people places and, as in the case of Brahma, also brings them round full circle to where they began.

Having qualified as a designer, Brahma is back at his pond, but his catch this time is a great idea. He is designing heritage dolls, so that young Bodos remember how their ancestors looked and what they wore. He is also setting up community museums to create a record of village life.

Being small, slow and mindful helps communities have a sense of identity. They get to take pride in their customs and traditions. Having the same jeans, bikes, cars, sneakers and cell phones isn’t good enough. People also like to be recognized for being different and special in their own ways.

India is a brilliant mosaic of such different identities all struggling to survive the onslaught of new technologies and expanding consumerism. So, in the past 21 years, Civil Society magazine has opened up its pages to traditional crafts, skills, seeds, plants, cuisines, song, dance, attire and more.

Many social enterprises and new-age companies have been the bridge between communities and the marketplace, creating ethical products with respect for sustainability, community rights, local knowledge and organic choices.  

In such modern, future-ready businesses we have found young, self-defined, educated entrepreneurs raising the bar for fair trade practices, ownership and the interests of consumers.

Ours is a burgeoning compendium of uniquely branded products from coffee, cheese and noodles to jewellery, rugs and furniture and all that comes in between, which would include donkey milk. In addition, there are farmers now increasingly aware of their intellectual rights over what they produce — be it jaggery, bananas, mangoes, rice or jackfruit.

The new-age enterprise addresses the new-age consumer who seeks to heal the world with what is inclusive, wholesome and safe. It is not just the ingredients of a product, but also how growers are compensated, the production processes employed and, finally, integrity in the marketplace.

 

HEALTHY NOODLES

Many a small business tends to score well on these counts because it is driven by ideas and personal conviction. Growth and profits matter but values take precedence, resulting in enduring relationships with consumers and producers. Could such businesses, we ask ourselves, be laying the foundations of a better market, a more responsible style of ownership? 

Naturally Yours is our all-time favourite story of how new businesses get built and become valuable to the founders and society at large with inventiveness, goodwill and passion, and very little by way of investment.

Naturally Yours is the brand name for healthy noodles which has now garnered a community of customers who won’t settle for anything else. These are noodles made from millets, red rice, black rice, quinoa and other healthy grains as opposed to the average noodle that is made from flour, is full of starch and comes preserved with chemicals.

The healthy noodle idea came to Vinod Kumar while he was retailing organic products in Mumbai from a store named Naturally Yours. People, he noticed, were ready to pay a little more to eat chemical-free products. They also chose millets over rice. Awareness of what would be a healthy diet was increasing and that wasn’t just among the well-off, but ordinary folks as well.

He teamed up with his microbiologist wife, Priya Prakash, to start producing multi-millet noodles which they first sold to the customers who regularly bought the unprocessed millets from the store. The noodles were a runaway success because, unlike regular millets, they did not require much time to cook. They were also less boring as a dish.

Now they have launched instant noodles, which, through an innovation, are free of chemicals and not pre-fried in palm oil the way other instant noodles are. These are even easier to process.

Vinod speaks proudly of customers who go nowhere else for their noodles and even order them from the US. Based in Mumbai, he sources his grains from farmer-producer companies across the country, often paying a premium for the sake of high quality.

“I come from a farming family and though I haven’t been farming myself I have some idea how difficult it is to grow something,” he says.

 

IMMERSIVE COFFEE

The Black Baza Coffee Co similarly has farmers’ interests at heart. The Black Baza varieties are sourced from small farmers in the Western Ghats. These are more like homesteads employing traditional and organic practices.

The coffee grows intertwined with other plants and trees and is visited by birds and reptiles. It is a world far removed from coffee plantations and chemical agriculture.

Not surprisingly, Arshiya Bose, Black Baza’s founder, calls her coffee ‘diversity friendly’.  Black Baza is itself a bird. There is a coffee called Ficus, which of course is the fig tree. Other coffees go by names such as Draco, Whistling Schoolboy, Kaati, Otter, Luna.

As a Black Baza customer you contribute to preserving the intricate biodiversity of the Western Ghats and hopefully spreading some awareness about it. You also do your bit for protecting livelihoods. Bose gives the farmers she buys from 17 percent of the price she sells at, which is huge compared to the 2.8 percent that growers usually get.        

Bose is an unlikely entrepreneur. She has a Ph.D. and was researching sustainability certifications for coffee when the small farmers sought her help to connect with markets. From one thing to the next, an ethical company was born.

 

ARTISANS WITH EQUITY

How should producers be adequately rewarded for what they grow and make? Farmers and craftspeople tend to lose out in market equations, but they really don’t have to. They can, in fact, be owners.

Rangsutra has shown how. Over several years of hard work and entrepreneurial effort, Rangsutra has become successful as a line of fashionwear supplying stores and also as a brand in its own right.

It draws on the talent of women in the villages of Rajasthan to weave, stitch and design its garments. But instead of merely being paid for their work, the women are also the shareholders of the company and sit on its board. This is a big leap forward from the disadvantaged status that artisans usually have.

Rangsutra is not just about the beautiful clothes it produces, but also the empowerment it provides. It has shown women how they can earn from their traditional skills. It has helped them work from their homes and then given them the confidence to move out to workplaces. But above all, it has given them ownership.

Sumita Ghose, who has been the guiding light of this rare initiative, will tell you how the Rangsutra company shares the women hold are just about the only thing they own in the patriarchal society to which they belong.

Ghose says crafts should be equated with fashion to succeed. But connecting rural talent with market demand is not so simple. Even as they earn from their own enterprise, craftspeople are wired differently. There are periods when they would rather be in their fields than working in production lines. There are also the social disadvantages that women face. Getting different worlds to coalesce is not easy.

Can platforms then be constructed to source and showcase different handicrafts? Is an alternative marketplace possible?

iTokri is one such online option created by Jia and Nitin Pamnani, she a microbiologist and he a filmmaker. It offers a wide range of crafts which it aggregates thanks to the efforts of its founders.

The iTokri kind of platform works well because, for the consumer it makes a selection and provides an easy transaction and for the producer it bridges the gap with the consumer with a technological solution.

But it is just a single enterprise and not enough. Craftspeople seasonally show up in cities to offer their products in challenging settings. The consumer becomes a bargain hunter and the producers try to make the best of trips. A happier space is needed to make such transactions better structured and more wholesome.

Many of the finest products in India either languish or die because craftspeople lack the capacity to deal with market realities.

In West Bengal, the weavers of tussar silk, unique and much sought after for generations, couldn’t survive the influx of cheaper materials. It was overtaken in the market and made redundant. It was a matter of chance that an NGO, Ahead Initiatives, stepped in and developed tussar into a modern-day brand in its own right under the name of Oikko.

There are much larger ramifications to such stories. Until Oikko happened, Tantipara’s local economy had all but collapsed. Younger people were abandoning weaving as a skill. There was migration to other cities and once-talented people were opting for menial jobs just to get by.

Now, with Oikko being positioned as an organic brand, there has been a revival of vegetable dyes and associated sustainable practices. Tantipara is being represented in exhibitions and enquiries have been coming in. There is now hope among traditional weavers that they may be able to survive. Local talent in design and embroidery, long dormant, has begun to emerge.

 

NOT EASY

For all the social and economic value that can be derived from traditional crafts, the recognition they need from the government eludes them. They get, at best, lip service from policymakers and elites.

Mostly, the work of craftspeople ends up being appropriated by more powerful market forces. They get left behind and not enough effort is made to protect their interests and make them competitive. 

When interventions do happen, it is by happenstance. The help the tussar weavers of Tantipara have got from Ahead Initiatives is an example. If the NGO hadn’t been there on an after-school project, it might never have visualized the opportunity that the weavers and the rest of Tantipara were losing out on.

In much the same way, Rangsutra has had to cut its own path and devise an empowerment and ownership model for women in the villages of Rajasthan. Despite the potential, Rangsutra didn’t receive the kind of handholding it could really have done with for creating a remarkable company. It had to muddle its way through rules and procedures.

People who set out to run rural enterprises realize how difficult it is to keep them going. Samuel Yonzon relocated to his father’s farm 11 years ago to, among other things, produce Kalimpong cheese. We were thrilled to find him and the iconic cheese some months ago after searching on the internet.

But when we called Samuel for an update on his story for this anniversary issue, he informed us that he had given up after 11 years of trying and was heading back to a life in the city, being in debt and unable to cope with lack of infrastructure in Kalimpong.

But, despite the odds, it is in the unique diversity and array of skills and traditions that a treasure trove of opportunity lies. Keeping them alive and leveraging their value is important. The products we showcase month after month in our magazine is a step in this direction. We present some of them again in the pages that follow in this anniversary offering.