Skill, Entrepreneurship and Market Development of the Handicrafts Sector in Western Rajasthan: Learning from the Life Cycle

Intervening to build entrepreneurship among the women of Barmer engaged in textile crafts, Udyogini moves from direct implementation to a facilitating role.

Overview

T he key issues confronting social businesses today are assessing their scalability potential and developing models that are replicable. Craft artisans, in particular, face these problems, owing to the volatile market, skill and supply constraints, complex logistics, and long and mostly unorganized supply chains. Due to these complexities, the margins in the product sales are low—for the artisans as well as the upstream entrepreneurs. Yet, artisan crafts are an important area of social business in India because the handicrafts sector is the second largest employer, after agriculture, in the country./p>

Textiles account for almost half the handicrafts sector; other craft segments in their order of significance are cane and bamboo, wood, metal, straw/grass/fibre, clay/ceramics, leather and stone. Market channels include wholesalers, retailers and exhibitions. For products promoted by NGOs, there are alternative sales channels such as small shops (including co-operative societies) and exhibitions organized by craft organizations. The study estimates that these alternative channels, despite having carved a niche in up-market consumer circles, have not built adequate sales volumes, and, therefore, cannot be counted as prominent market players. Some NGOs, working with artisans, have preferred to develop their own alternative value chains in order to gain high returns for the producers. However, cases of success in such instances are few.