CHIN UP: Workers at Mumbai NGO Creative Handicrafts

This Diwali, the women of Kutumb Sakhya, a women’s organisation in Mumbai, had a lot to celebrate. A Rs 5 lakh order for Diwali sweets had them enthusiastically rolling out and deep frying Maharashtrian delicacies in their crowded 300 sq ft kitchen centre. Further west, the women of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in rural Gujarat brought in Diwali by rushing to meet an order for ethnic garments, worth Rs 35 lakh.

Both these instances are but examples of how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) today are increasingly reaching out to poor women. Of course, that NGOs have been lending a helping hand to women is no secret. But one question begs an answer. Are these efforts by NGOs sufficient to sustain the poor women they support?

Not quite. Most NGOs that employ women simply don’t pay their women workers enough, either because they can’t afford to or because they don’t want to.

Geeta Shetye, the grande dame of Kutumb Sakhya, who has been a cook with the organisation since its inception in 1977, is the highest earning member of the group, with a monthly salary of Rs 3,500. And considering that she began with a salary of Rs 20 a month, this figure, she says, has far surpassed her dreams. But if a woman were to join the organisation today, she would be paid Rs 50 a day. With an annual increment of Rs 200, she could hope to reach Shetye’s Rs 3,500 salary only in a decade or so.

Mahananda, a young woman who has been working at Kutumb Sakhya for the last 23 years, takes home Rs 3,000 a month. This amount, she says, does not meet her family’s monthly expenses. And as is the case with most of the women of her ilk, her husband is out of work for most of the time, leaving her to support her family of four.

As it often happens with most income generation programmes run by women’s organisations, women get paid on a piece rate basis. At the Society to Help Rural Empowerment and Education (STHREE), which addresses the burgeoning issue of trafficking in women in rural Andhra Pradesh, the women (mostly former sex workers) get paid anything between Rs 800 and Rs 1,500 a month or less. Sewing and embroidering a richly sequinned evening bag that would fetch about Rs 500 in the market gets a woman Rs 100 as making charges. If completed at some speed, it could take up to two days to make a bag. But these women can’t always work at speed. Given their work history and lifestyle in brothels, they easily get distracted. As seen in some of the women’s organisations, piece rate earnings alternate between the reasonable and the outrageously low.

Take the Mumbai-based Women’s India Trust (WIT). It pays a woman Rs 2 for sewing and another 50 paise for cutting a simple cloth bag priced at Rs 42. So where does the rest of the money go? “Towards production costs and salaries of staff at the production centre,” explains Safiya Mistry, who heads the tailoring unit at WIT’s centre at Panvel, on the outskirts of Mumbai. Mistry also draws comfort from the fact that women are paid half that much outside in the market.

At Creative Handicrafts, an NGO in Mumbai that provides self-employment opportunities to 350 women in the slums and tribal pockets of the city through handicraft and garment making, wo-men earn between Rs 800 and Rs 2,000 a month, says Vidya Lad, a coordinator (Creative Handicrafts director Johny Joseph, however, puts the monthly earnings at between Rs 1,800 and Rs 3,500, which, he says, includes the profit percentage).

The NGO derives one fourth of its earnings from the sale of handicrafts. Its balance sheet for 2003-2004 puts the net income from the sale of handicrafts at Rs 18.31 lakh, out of a total net income of Rs 72.87 lakh. According to Joseph, the gross income from the sale of handicrafts for 2004-2005 amounted to Rs 1.2 crore, about twice that of the previous year (Rs 50-55 lakh). Joseph says that the money goes towards covering the organisation’s administrative costs.

In Tamil Nadu’s Krishnagiri district, 178 young, semi-literate women work at Meadow Rural Enterprise Ltd. They earn Rs 2,500-Rs 3,000 a month for assembling watch straps, bracelets and embedding gemstones in jewellery for Titan, the Tata group’s watch company. According to Meadow Rural Enterprise CEO K.P. Anandan, the NGO has a memorandum of understanding with Titan.

This arrangement fetches the NGO between Rs 70 lakh and Rs 80 lakh a year. Titan pays Meadow on a piece rate basis ? 85 paise for assembling a watch strap and Rs 1.38 for putting together a bracelet. Fixing a gem (precious or otherwise) fetches Rs 5.

According to Anandan, Meadow earns a profit margin of 5-7 per cent, two thirds of which is given to the women. “In 2004, they got Rs 3,000-Rs 3,500,” he says. But by Anandan’s own admission, these earnings are not enough for the women. “But then, there is also no other source of employment for them,” he points out.

Quite clearly, NGOs aren’t paying women enough, for a variety of reasons, as these examples illustrate. This is not to argue that they play no useful function. Through their income generation programmes, NGOs have been instrumental in helping women cross some difficult hurdles, helping them escape the grip of bonded labour, money lenders, alcoholic husbands, and above all, grinding poverty. But some are clearly exploiting poor women too.

The big question, then, is whether women who work at NGOs can earn more money. The answer, argues activist Medha Patkar, lies with the government. “It (the government) must provide a market, not just to NGOs but also to small scale industries.” The low wages earned by women working in the income generation programmes of NGOs, she adds, are endemic to the informal sector where profits are much lower than in the formal sector. “While NGOs certainly have lower profits, many of them function on a no-profit-no-loss basis, which makes it very difficult to function.” Patkar adds that while some NGOs provide security to women, not all of them are above board. They need to be investigated and judged.

C.V. Turkar, state representative to UNICEF, who is on deputation from the department of women and child development in New Delhi, comes down heavily on such NGOs. “There are those that live off the work of the artisans, paying them very little and retaining a large part of the profits. We need to get these artisans out of the clutches of these NGOs, many of which work like the government and are as dangerous as the government.”

Vidya Ramchandran, programme officer at NGO Mysore Resettlement and Development Agency (MYRADA) in Bangalore also disapproves of NGOs running businesses and treating women as labourers. But Madhura Chhatrapathi, founder trustee of the Asian Centre for Entrepreneural Initiative (ASCENT), an organisation that guides 200 cobbler families (600 artisans) that produce Kolhapuri chappals under the banner of Toehold in rural Belgaum district in Karnataka, may have the last word when she says: “Income generation projects are never growth-oriented. They have a welfare approach and the people they work with don’t even know why they are there.”