My Story

Intro

Rural artisans in India often lack the skills, knowledge and market access to professionally market their products and to earn a sustainable income. Vijaya founded Chitrika to develop the people behind the art and to enable those creative minds to escape poverty.

About Me

Working on crafts-based livelihoods has been my passion since 2004. After gaining my professional qualification in rural management I started exploring crafts-based livelihoods in India. Looking at the current approaches and scale, I felt a need for an organization to promote and revamp producer enterprises into business enterprises. Professionalizing the sector was the key aim wherein artisans will be the key players. Since organizations were either focusing on design or marketing, I wanted to create an organization where all these services can be provided under one roof with appropriate institutional structure. Traveling extensively across Andhra Pradesh and India, understanding the social and economic implications of crafts inspired me to start my organization.

My Venture

Chitrika is an artisan support organization working in Andhra Pradesh. The organization was founded to support artisans in marketing, production and institutional aspects. Apart from support to artisans in their current livelihoods, Chitrika will also aid them in accessing better livelihood options outside the value-chain. Chitrika’s focus is to create self-sustaining institutions of artisans for supporting their marketing and production initiatives. Transferring the marketing skills, building market intelligence network and providing access to technology are crucial to translate market knowledge into marketing skills. When such kind of systems are created, where the artisans are in direct contact with the dynamic scenarios, a way to sustainable artisan livelihoods will emerge and this sums up Chitrika’s core philosophy.

Chitrika will primarily work in Andhra Pradesh and our key activities can be broadly classified as 1) Collectives Promotion, 2) Linking the artisans to vectors – market, technology and finance, 3) Education of producer, user and marketer, 4) Enhancing the current artisan practices through – better technology, environmental friendly processes and producer-controlled interventions.

One of the key aims of Chitrika is to promote artisan owned and managed business enterprises, which are currently rare and require creating a structure where there is a possibility for private players to invest. The key innovative features about the project are:

1. The Structure: Where the artisan business enterprises have the majority stake in the company and the rest of the shares held by interested investors. Also each business enterprise of the weavers will have their own support units – raw material bank, dyeing unit, printing unit and garmenting unit.
2. Range of services: Production, marketing, business enterprise management services are rendered across the structure
3. Use of technology in marketing, production and inventory management