Home / All Socio-economic Activities / Providing machinery to paper maché artisans… A Capacity Building initiative by SETU…
SETU is pledged towards all-round development of the artisan groups, with special focus on capacity building. This involves developing skill sets of artisans, market readiness training, upgrading technology & infrastructure, ensuring health & safety and so on….
One of the major strategies to enhance capacity building & increase self-sustainability of artisans is to enable backward & forward integration of their value chains.
We are working with numerous artisan groups across India are who engaged in a diverse range of handicraft skills. One such talented artisan group is based in Srinagar. They make beautiful papier mâché products and SETU helps in providing them a marketing platform & ensuring fair wages for their efforts.
Papier mâché is an age old craft that involves intricate hand painting on various shapes and products like boxes, trays, decoratives, home décor items etc, created out of reinforced paper pulp. To sustain in today’s competitive market, artisans need to innovate in terms of raw materials, shapes, designs, product range etc. Now a days, MDF & wood have also become a part of the ‘papier mâché’ range. Most papier mâché artisans are dependent on “out sourced” facilities for cutting of raw materials & finishing of products. Even for basic processes like cutting, grinding & designing of new shapes, they are forced to approach outside agencies in market, which takes up a lot of time, energy and money. Not only this hampers their creativity, but also reduces productivity and increases their cost of production, making them non-competitive.
To solve the above problems for the artisans, SETU sponsored them two machineries to be used for finishing and cutting purposes. With the aid of these, artisans can quickly create different shapes & patterns in-house and also achieve better finishing. They are quite happy now as they can reap following benefits from these.. 🙂
