M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, July 28: Women of Sakhi Mandals are busy stitching Tiranga at neck break speed at the Koel Aajeevika Apparel Park in Chainpur in Palamu.
The Har Ghar Tiranga campaign has shot up the demand for tricolour. The Koel Aajeevika Apparel Park is now abuzz with the cutting and stitching all for the national flags.
More than three lakhs national flags are to be readied under the Har Ghar Tiranga programme and as the time is short, the women are in hurry.
District programme manager of the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society Bimlesh Kumar Shukla said, “Tiranga making here at this Apparel Park has enlivened and energised our Koel Aajeevika Apparel Park which bore the brunt of the Coronavirus devastatingly. Our Didis of the 32 Sakhi Mandals is doing this job only from Wednesday as late in the afternoon of Wednesday we got to this stitching job of the Tiranga following directives from the state government.”
“We believe each of our women shortlisted for it would be fast enough to prepare around 200 national flags a day,” he added.
The national flag is 16 inches wide and 24 inches long. It is neither cotton nor polyester but Roto fabric. Each of the tricolours so prepared here will be priced at Rs18.
Bimlesh Kumar Shukla said the Rehla-based caustic chemical factory, under its CSR programme, has placed an order for 50, 000 national flags at the rate of Rs 18 per flag.
Lagatar24.com correspondent today went to Koel Aajeevika Apparel Park in Chainpur in Palamu to see how the stitching of the national flag is going on.
There was a great sense of joy here among the woman stitchers. The district programme manager Shukla and the block programme manager Satya Priy Tiwary were making rounds of the sewing machine tables asking women to deliver the maximum number of the stitched Tiranga.
Puja Devi a matriculate only knows the stitching well. She said she would try to stitch as many as 150 and above Tirangas a day. Rinki Devi is a 10th pass woman and is too enthusiastic about stitching Tiranga.
At least 4 Tirangas can be made of one-meter fabric each of the saffron, white and green colours. This Apparel Park has right now 10,000 meters of fabric in each of the three colours of the Tiranga.
A woman stitcher is to get 2.50 paise per stitched national flag here. Sources said 50 paise of this will be deducted from the corpus fund of this Koel Aajeevika Apparel Park.
However, there is one great problem with this Apparel Park which is its electricity bill. It came even for months when this Apparel Park was all shut and closed.
In the years 2020 and 2021 which were ravaged by the Coronavirus and when thousands of institutes were under lockdown including this Apparel Park, the electricity bill of this Apparel Park came coming at the rate of the industrial unit which is now around Rs 6 lakhs.
Again this Park is still in its rudimentary stage where beyond the school uniform, petticoat and now this Tiranga, its finished fabric goods have neither any market nor any consumption.
Shukla agreed that to keep this Apparel Park viable a sustainable market linkage of this Apparel Park is essential and this will be possible only when women here have the art of making finished products of the fabric that the market demands and it can compete with the branded ones.
“We have stitched school uniforms for both boys and girls stashed in this Park which no school ever demands. These stitched school uniforms are worth Rs 18 lakhs and now it is no better than any dead asset,” Shukla said.
“We will bring this to the notice of the district administration as to how to go about this Rs 18 lakh worth of stitched and ready-to-wear school uniforms. Auction of it is the solution but it is a long-drawn procedure” he added.
Sources said in the Apparel Park there is an abundance of leftovers of the fabric like abandoned cut pieces of a variety of sizes. Shukla said we stuff all such leftovers of the fabric and we are looking for anyone to buy it from us to make ‘gadda’, not to be confused with the mattress etc.
