At the recently concluded Dastkar’s Nature Bazaar, one of the most eye-catching displays of crafts was on a rickshaw. Festooned with beautifully crafted bags woven by members of the Society for Child Development (SFCD), it attracted many interested visitors. And when they were told that those bags had been woven with waste videotape – that too by young adults with intellectual disabilities – most were impressed enough to buy some. Standing across the rickshaw, I was struck by the sheer innovativeness of the products on sale. I was also struck by the fact that most of the customers did not seem to be driven solely by a sense of charity towards the disadvantaged people who’d made them – they seemed to find the bags genuinely interesting. As I watched a couple of college girls try on bag after bag to see which one would suit them best, I reckoned that this was probably the best accolade the makers of those bags could get.
I said as much when I met Dr Madhumita Puri, secretary, SFCD, and she told me how this organisation had evolved. “Eighteen years ago, we set up a school for the intellectually disabled,” she said. However, conversations with the students’ families left them feeling that they needed to do more. “We realised that education was meaningless to them since it did not pave the way for future or livelihoods,” she added. So they founded the Vocational Training Centre in 1999, as a transition point between education and occupation, with the idea of fostering marketable income-generating skills in the students. But what skills could the intellectually disabled easily learn?
Weaving had distinct possibilities. “It involves repetitive movements that many of them find rather soothing,” Puri said. A simple loom was bought. But when it arrived, it proved too complicated even for Puri and her team to use. So they created a frame that their students could easily use, and began training some of their students to weave. But the organisation was too cash-strapped to afford raw materials. “Then one morning, I saw an unraveled videotape, and it struck me that the tape would make interesting yarn for weaving!” Puri said. Thus, their trademark fabric woven from videotape, Tapric, was born. In a variation, they wove fabric with salvages sewn on the sides of jute bales that jute product manufacturers normally throw away.
Since their idea was to make the intellectually disabled self-sufficient, Puri developed the fabrics they wove into bags, big and small. “We lined the bags with leftover scraps of cloth donated by exporters,” she recounted, “soon we trained a team of hearing-impaired people to oversee the finishing of the products.” Soon the students were making not just bags, but folders, dhurries and more. Another group of students was simultaneously trained to make acid-free handmade paper. Under the name Art for Prabhat, they requested famous artists like Anjolie Ela Menon and Jatin Das to paint on their paper. “We auctioned those paintings and managed to raise a fair amount of funds,” said Puri.
Today, Art for Prabhat is an established name in the art world. And members of the SFGD Vocational Centre do not only set up a rickshaw display every weekend at Dilli Haat and participate in other fairs, they also supply in bulk to companies and NGOs. As a result, today, the average worker there earns Rs 6,000-7,000, even if it is after six years of painstaking training. “To the intellectually disabled, learning even the smallest skill is hugely tough,” said Puri, “and I’m a hard taskmaster to boot!” But at the end of the day her tough love probably lights up these lives much more than simple charity ever could.