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Fashion
with a human face
Behind the glitzy shopping
malls with fashionable garments and the glitter of catwalks,
there are many who work silently. Among them today are the
disabled too, who have discovered a new dignity of labour,
reports TWF correspondent Usman Faisal
With the overly visible twitches of his face, Rajiv Sharma
lifts the packet from his desk and utters 'Ehm' in a laboured
voice. The 'Ehm' means the size M for the T-shirt in the packet.
From behind a nearby desk, the neatly dressed Zameer Julka
picks up a handful of tags and tried hard to say something,
but can't. The blue and white coloured tags bear the brand
name 'Harvest' for the T-shirt Sharma is holding.
Sharma, 31, and Zameer, 32, are mentally challenged. Like
20 others with various disabilities they work in a factory
that exports ready made garments to the US and Europe. According
to a study conducted by the National Institute of Fashion
Technology (NIFT) two years ago, the garment industry is likely
to provide 900,000 additional jobs
between 2002 and 2005. NIFT's garment department head Rajesh
Bheda sees Sharma and Julka's factory 'Balloons' and a handful
of others who employ people with disabilities as the torchbearers
of a silent revolution in the making.
"The garment industry will be able to give three per
cent of the 900,000 additional jobs to the disabled thus rekindling
the lives of thousands who otherwise would be depending on
their families for their survival," says Bheda. The three
per cent, Bheda calculates, may be too few for a disabled
population of 16 million in India, but it far exceeds the
percentage of disabled people employed by other industries
in the prosperous private sector.
A study by the National Centre for Providing Employment to
Disabled People (NCPEDP) a few years ago found that among
the top 100 corporate houses in the country, only 0.4 per
cent of their employees were people with disabilities. In
the Balloons factory situated in a congested village in South
Delhi surrounded by a posh colony, 40 disabled people work
in the assembly line. Sharma, one of the nine mentally challenged
employees, matches the polythene packets with their corresponding
T-shirts from among sizes ranging from small to extra large.
Like Julka, Sharma, who suffers
from cerebral palsy, has been getting a stipend of Rs 1,200
in the past one-and-a-half years.
At Balloons, the disabled employees handle almost all jobs
from stitching to packing. They manage sewing machines and
even the cuff and collar turning machines. Recruited with
a help of its own voluntary agency Disha, Balloons puts them
through a brief training before they are sent to the assembly
line. "During the training, each person is identified
to do a particular job according to his or her abilities,"
says Rashmi Paliwal, who owns Balloons.
"They are trained to do a particular job in the assembly
line, which is consistent with a quality product that can
be sold in the international market," says Bheda, who
recently conducted a workshop for exporters in New Delhi about
the benefits of employing disabled people following a request
from their American buyers.
Four years ago, NIFT began its dream project of employing
the disabled in the
garment industry when it asked two of its students to undertake
a study to see if it was possible to successfully train them
for the industry. "We received two volunteers from the
Blind Relief Association of India and took them to our workshop
and the Balloons
for a two-week training. We were amazed how soon the two blind
men picked up
the work," says Bheda. NIFT commissioned another study
by its students two years later to see how the disabilities
affected a person's ability to do some kind of work. "We
understood that we could do a matchmaking, like finding out
what kind of ability is required of a job and match it with
a disabled person."
Bheda, who wrote to several garment exporters about the project,
found that the exporters were willing to employ people with
disabilities if they were sufficiently trained to do some
task. "Not all the exporters were keen, however. Some
said they didn't want to employ these people because that
would unnecessarily attract government inspectors who would
come to find out if they worked in the best conditions. Some
others said productivity would suffer," recalls Bheda.
The eight disabled employees working in RMX Joss in New Delhi's
Okhla industrial area are no less productive than the other
employees, says its proprietor Suresh Dhir. In fact, people
like Bheda, Dhir and Paliwal have found that these employees
have a better sense of discipline and commitment to work than
other workers in the industry. "The hearing impaired
are prone to less distractions than other normal staff. That
is a plus point because generally the garment industry workforce
in India is not highly
efficient," says Bheda.
Vijay Gupta, 35, who is blind, operates the cuff-turning
machine in Balloons, slowly moving shirt cuffs into a press
to give them a definite shape. Gupta's four other similarly
affected colleagues, including Ram Prakash Gupta, 55, who
lost a leg in an accident when he was only 18, operate a collar
turning machine together. "We all excel in certain tasks.
That is our ability," says Pailwal with pride, who won
the Hellen Keller Award for her contribution to employing
disabled people four years ago.
"They are gaining in dignity of being useful members
of the society. They realise that they are working just like
the others," says Paliwal, who with Bheda is collaborating
in a project at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi,
to develop a button-holing machine that can be handled by
a blind worker. Says Paliwal, "If we can train the
visually impaired people, imagine the number of people it
will help get jobs."
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