Villagers smelt bell-metal at the hammer-smith oven at Tunju. Picture by Hardeep Singh

Tunju (Ranchi), Aug. 30: Tunju village, about 50km from the capital, is just a shadow of what it was.

The once flourishing cottage industry is left with only five persons of the hamlet, beside the Kanchi river on Ranchi-Jamshedpur highway, involved in their ancestral business of making bell-metal utensils.

With the rise in use of steel utensils, demand for bell-metal items have gone down. Now these utensils are bought only during special occasions such as weddings and for performing rituals, said Mathura Kundu, one of the five utensil makers. Others have shifted to odd jobs such as hawking breads, biscuits and lozenges in the neighbouring villages.

Earlier, over 60 families of the village were engaged in making bell-metal items. “My ancestors had come from Burdwan district of Bengal and settled down here long back. Since then, we have been eking out a living through this profession,” Kundu said.

Due to poor demand of utensils, things have come to such a state that only five of us are involved in make these items and we all use one smith-hammer oven for smelting the pieces of broken utensils that we use as raw material, he added.

The raw material is bought from a wholesaler to make new utensils which fetch them some remuneration. “We normally get 10kg of raw material and as per demand make items within a few days,” said Shambhunath Das, another utensil maker. The remuneration is Rs 240 per kg, he added.

Kundu, however, said that people harboured a misconception that bell-metal items were brittle and attributed it as one of the reasons for decline in its sale.

He said: “It depends on the tempering of the metal, if it is done properly it does not break.”

Despite the expertise in tempering, the bell-metal utensil makers are finding it hard to make ends meet and the brunt is being faced by the industry that is slowly becoming a thing of the past.