Skilled artisans who don’t know where to sell products...
DUDHWA (KHERI): Sarva Preet Kaur, a Tharu community woman, is the bread earner for her family. She also plays a dominant role in running the house.
Life is still quite tough for her and other women of her community. “We make bamboo jewellery and incandescent sticks round the year but are able to sell them to tourists coming here only between November and April, the peak tourist season. The remaining part of the year there are hardly any buyers,” said Kaur, a native of the Bansinagar village in Kheri district.
“About 30% of the turmeric powder we produce in a year gets spoiled because there are no takers. When stock of jewellery gets piled up we stop making them,” said Bela, another Tharu woman from Makanpur village.
The produce mostly gets sold off at makeshift stalls in Dudhwa or some of the carnivals organised in the state.
But there is no system by which their produce can get sold in market. It is festivals like the one going on at Dudhwa where they look forward to buyers.
WHO EXACTLY ARE THARUS?
They are a group of women who migrated from Rajasthan and settled in Uttar Pradesh and Nepal due to war in their native place. “We migrated and settled here generations before,” said Leela Devi Rana of Sonha village.
This community is particularly women dominated but their lives is hard as they basically live in forest and have adopted a lifestyle sustainable with the wild animals, including tiger elephant and rhino found in the region. “Several Toniya (earthen pots) with water are always hanged outside our house so that in case of forest fire we can douse it immediately,” said Leela Devi Rana adding: “If there is a tiger around we can sense its presence by the change in activity of small or domestic animals living with us.”
The community members do not purchase items used in their homes but make them by self —whether they are kitchen utensils or items used for ploughing.
“The days we are able to sell our products we get to earn over Rs 150 but when there are no tourists, we have nothing. No marketing facility exists for our products,” said Archana, a young Tharu girl from Gabraula.
In Kheri alone about 3600 women from 44 villages work with Arti Rana, the woman who has traveled places including Goa, Bhopal and Jaipur to sell jute bags and mats made by women in Khiri, but she too finds it difficult to market the products. “We are not educated hence fail to finds marketing ways,” said Arti, who had met chief minister Yogi Adityanath at the fair and sold him a hat.