Traditionally, the weaving of carpets and rugs in India has been a cottage industry — weavers picked up raw materials from vendors of carpets, weaved at home, and returned the finished product to the vendors. From looms to technology to automation, nothing much had changed in the way carpets were made. Weavers did not want to work in factories, the work ethic was below-par, and women never worked. “Workers had many apprehensions,” says Zafar Iqbal Ansari, chairman, Eastern Home Industries, a carpet supplier in Bhadohi a village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Many workers worried about automation, and very few appreciated the benefits of bank accounts, gratuities, provident fund, statutory holidays and medical facilities that working in a factory would provide.
The intervention of a major European retailer has changed the scenario. It got involved in training, counseling and guiding the vendors as also the workers. It is encouraging its suppliers to adopt global norms for manufacturing, and to shift to bigger and automated factories. One of Ansari’s factories now employs 2,000 people (up from 100 in 2008), 300 of whom are women for whom training programs were organized to make them employable. Each worker that works in his factory now has a bank account, gets a weekly day off and other statutory benefits. With the help of interns from the Indian Institute of Technology, looms have been redesigned and partly mechanized, doubling worker productivity and also enabling women to work on processes that are physically strenuous. Ansari says “I see a substantial expansion into new factories and categories in the next two years.”
