The Hindu Business Line : Craft commerce

Working for the love of it is fine, but the ruthless bottom line for most workers is that work should translate to money. And that applies to even what may be considered very artistic, such as woven mats.

For instance, after meeting many Labbais in Pattamadai, whose traditional occupation is weaving, Soumhya Venkatesan discovers that the marketability factor dictates the forms that mats take. “Colours, patterns, sizes, have to conform to what tra ders — NGOs, local Labbai traders or wholesalers — want and can sell,” she writes in Craft Matters: Artisans, development and the Indian nation ( www.orientblackswan.com ).

Finding a market is more crucial for superfine mats, which are expensive, reflecting the amount of time taken to produce them. Costing up to Rs 4,000 or £50 each, they are produced for sale — weavers cannot afford not to sell them; even if they could afford to hold on to their mats, they would have no use for them, the author learns.

“One weaver said to me: What do people do with our superfine mats once they have bought them? She was quite serious in her question. The mats are too fine and slippery to spread on the floor to sit or sleep on.”

A very real fear among artisans, as Venkatesan observes, is that a mat on which time, money and effort have been expended will be rejected.

Woefully limited are the avenues for weavers who would like to innovate and display technical skills and taste, ‘without having to bear the considerable opportunity costs on their own and then to successfully make a mark with it.’

In the crafts bazaar, she encounters the bizarre tension between the craft object as ‘object+person+idea’ and the object as ‘thing without person’ (or commodity), with the sellers seeking to emphasise the former, and buyers, the latter.

“That buyers do not bargain with people whom they perceive to be of the same social status as them or of higher social status, for instance, urban educated elites, but will bargain with weavers who are known as socially inferior (people who work with their hands, hailing from villages, not speaking English, wearing, often by special request of craft bazaar organisers, their ‘traditional’, i.e., old-fashioned clothing) is revealing of the way in which the weaver becomes only partially acceptable because of the objects he makes that others covet.”

Well-written.

Dysfunctional subsidies

The much-expected trickle-down process induced, propelled and sustained by technologically-induced economic growth has failed to benefit a large proportion of the people in the countryside, rues Ramashray Roy in Economy, Democracy and the State: The Indian experience ( www.sagepublications.com ).

“Agriculture still remains the vehicle of improving their lot and yet agricultural growth records deceleration in recent years. On top of it, technological improvements in the farm sector have tremendously increased the cost of farming.”

The author observes that a large-scale adoption of new technology calls for subsidising farmers so that they can recover the expected loss due to the gap between input costs and the price of the output they get.

But subsidies can have dysfunctional outcomes, especially in the areas of power and irrigation, he cautions.

For example, "Despite the fact that un-irrigated area constitutes about 60 per cent of GCP, 91 per cent of farm subsidies go to irrigated areas." Also, irrigation departments function at 40 per cent efficiency level, and 44 per cent of water is lost in the canal itself.

"Since water rates are low and unrelated to the quantity of water used, the farmers have no compunction in using more water than necessary, nor do the irrigation functionaries have any incentive for conserving water."