How Usha Silai schools are creating opportunities for women in rural areas

In a small room in Nand Lal Basti, a slum in North Delhi, 10 women sit on the floor, heads bent over pieces of cloth. Their teacher is Anuradha Devi, a young homemaker who migrated to Delhi a few years ago with her husband. Initially, her husband and she shared a room with her parents and siblings as they couldn’t afford to rent a room of their own. One-and-a-half years ago, she got a chance to learn tailoring and her life changed. Today, her husband and she have built their own house with a room where Anuradha Devi conducts tailoring classes for a nominal monthly fee of Rs 100. She earns about Rs 4,000 a month from tailoring. Her students are her neighbours, and their daughters. Among them are sisters Ladli (17) and Chandni (15). Their mother thought tailoring could help make them self-reliant. Presently they earn enough money for bus fare to school by tailoring simple clothes. “I don’t know if I’ll do this as a career,” says Ladli. “But at least I’ll have an option!”

This motley band of women is part of the growing network of skilled seamstresses developed under the Usha Silai Schools initiative. By developing a tailoring curriculum and pedagogy that can be easily comprehended even by women with no prior experience, this program has been creating livelihood opportunities for women in low- income rural areas where none existed before. In partnership with 58 NGOs and 14 corporates/institutions, Usha International, which started this project in 2011 with a 20-school pilot, has expanded to 20,350 schools across the country today. So far, over four lakh women have completed this course and nearly 24,000 are trained every single day.  

Anuradha Devi, a young homemaker who conducts tailoring classes; and (left) students at a North Delhi Usha Silai School

 

“Our early field experiences showed us that rural women needed livelihoods they could successfully practise from home,” says Priya Somaiya, executive director Usha Social Services. “Tailoring seemed like a good fit.” Several factors have contributed to the scalability of the Silai School model. First, the training curriculum that Somaiya and her team developed is easy to modify as per local requirements. For example, Silai Schools in Punjab and Haryana teach women to stitch salwar kurtas in local styles, while women in Bihar and UP learn to tailor blouses and petticoats. Second, once trained, alumnae of Silai Schools find ready markets within their own communities. “They’re able to earn between Rs 30,000 and Rs 45,000 from their homes,” says Somaiya. Additionally, five design clusters have tie-ups with established designers like Rohit Bal, and sell their products under the high street fashion label Usha Silai. Third, the impact progresses geometrically as Silai School alumnae set up training schools of their own. The initial set-up cost of about Rs 17,000 per school is borne by Usha Silai and field partners. West Bengal and other state governments have also partnered with Usha Silai in this. 

Stories of personal transformations abound. A community of manual scavengers in Madhya Pradesh has rejected the demeaning profession and now runs successful tailoring units and production centres. Closer home, Anuradha Devi plans to construct another floor and develop a readymade garment business. For Somaiya and her colleagues, the task ahead is huge. “India has 6.5 lakh villages and we’re only in 10,500 of them,” says Somaiya. “This could be one way to address the rural employment issue but we have a long way to go!”

For more, see www.ushasilaischool.com 

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