Livelihoods
Features
Invisible, exploited: Home-workers of Agra’s footwear industry
Agra turns out 250,000 pairs of shoes every day. Most of them are made by invisible home-workers at the bottom of the global supply chain, who earn as little as Rs 30 a pair Agra turns out 250,000 pairs of shoes every day. Most of them are made by invisible home-workers at the bottom of the global supply chain, who earn as little as Rs 30 a pairSarojini is a home-worker at one of the 4,500 home-based units in Agra, the footwear capital of north India. For her, each new day marks a search for work to keep food on the table, a roof over her family, and her children in school. To her sub-contractor, she is known by a number. She is, quite simply, one piece in the supply chain of a footwear brand -- one of the million invisible workers in this industry. |
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Books & Reports
Captured By Cotton
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The Sumangali Scheme in Tirupur and Coimbatore districts lures young girls – often minors and dalits -- from impoverished areas of Tamil Nadu to work in MNC garments-manufacturing units on the promise of nutritious meals, comfortable accommodation and a lumpsum payment. What they actually encounter is poor work conditions, low wages, restricted freedom of movement, and limited privacy, says a study by SOMO and ICNChangemakers
Fighting for Chilika
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For years Maghi Mantri of Panda Pokhari on Chilika Lake watched as local fishermen were squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces by unscrupulous politicians, non-traditional fishermen and illegal shrimp and prawn traders. In 1992 she set up two self-help groups and began to mobilise the local village womenStories of Change
The building blocks of changeBelaku started as a small health research project in rural Karnataka. But then the women said it was all very well to tell them about nutrition and eating right, but who was going to pay for it? Thus began the livelihoods initiative, Kirana Belaku Trust started as a small health research project in rural Karnataka, in 1995. One of its founders, Dr Saraswathy Ganapathy, a paediatrician turned public health professional, recalls how bleak the project appeared then. “The women wouldn’t speak to us, or even look at us. The nutritionist came out from the first health session and wondered how to talk ‘calories’ to them.” |
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News
Orissa first off the block with National Rural Livelihoods MissionOrissa became the first state to launch the NRLM, aimed at reducing rural poverty by providing self-employment and skilled jobs to people below the poverty line Orissa became the first state in the country to launch the National Rural Livelihoods Mission on April 18, 2011. This comes even as the state faces a CBI inquiry ordered by the Ministry of Rural Development to probe alleged corruption and irregularities in the implementation of another major social sector scheme -- the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. |
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Statistics
Total number of main and marginal workers by sex |
Analysis
'Land reform: More problems than solutions'Land is the most contentious problem in India today. Although land policy development is taking place, the issue is being looked at in isolation, rather than in the overall framework of human rights, says Mukul Sharma |
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Backgrounders
Livelihoods : Background & Perspective
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Several UN and world summits now accede that the achievement of sustainable livelihoods is intricately linked with the eradication of poverty. But between international and government fora where 'sustainable livelihoods' is the new buzzword and the situation at the grassroots is a huge gap. For a decade of structural adjustment and the development-at-any-cost doctrine have conspired to deprive millions of Indians -- adivasi tribals, marginal farmers, weavers and others -- of their traditional means of livelihood.
