Jute for Life - 12 Feb 2019

She is providing economic stability to the rural women in Lucknow
I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
As a young girl of eight years, while her way back home, Anjali came across a couple of ladies with their children who were struggling on the footpath, a desire aroused then to change their lifestyle. She struggled for them and came up with the solution for their livelihood.
She completed her post graduation in Masters of BusinessAdministration(Tourism) and took up a marketing job. Her dream was to travel the world and experience different cultures but her childhood desire of helping the needy dominated her dream.
After working for 8 years in a job Anjali started “Jute Guild Women Artisans” in 2009 which is an organization that manufactures and sale jute products and she decided to employ skilled rural women artisans in her venture in order to offer them economic stability.
Jute being the strongest natural plant fiber, is durable and reusable. Seeing her father working in the NGO sector and generating vocational skills in the rural women she was very encouraged and thought of engaging these women to earn their livelihood as these women only learn the skills but don’t know how to use it as a living.
Anjali says that when she started there were a lot of problems in selling the products as people lack awareness but her aim to provide the livelihood to these women helped her to employ her marketing skills and therefore the organization has tied up with a lot of private and government organizations in order to sell their products.
Another major problem was to convince the family members the women workers as being a male-dominated society it was difficult for rural women to come out of their families and work. Some cases were really very serious and in order to bring these women out from their home to work, she had to seek the help of local authorities and police.
Initially, she started with a full-fledged workshop in a room at her home with just 5 workers and now there are 150 women workers who are working in the project. They also display their products at a lot of trade fairs and events. The profit that started as an annual turnover of Rs 1 lakh has now reached up to Rs 70-80 lakhs a year.
Anjali claims that through providing employment to these rural women who faced a lot of troubles in their family life she has assisted them to lead a respectable life with economic assurance. These rural artisans have become self-dependent, strong and confident. They could easily meet the basic necessities of life, give their children a good education and save for contingencies.
In the near future, Anjali hopes to associate more and more rural women to her project in order to give them a sense of economic assurance.