Weaving better alternatives for women displaced by climate change

By Teresa Rehman

KOKRAJHAR, India (AlertNet) - Swdwmsri Narzary, 19, a nimble weaver, rests her fingers on her loom and gets a faraway look when asked to recall her last few years of struggle dealing with the pressures of climate change.

Orphaned at an early age, Swdwmsri lived with her elder brother and his family in Bijni, a rural village in Assam province's Chirang district. But increasingly unpredictable weather conditions - drought one year, incessant and untimely rains the next - made life gradually harder as the family's crops repeatedly failed. With the family on the verge of starvation, Swdwmsri had to drop out of school. Her brother decided not to waste money sowing new crops and instead used his remaining cash to migrate to a nearby city, Guwahati, in search of a job.

Swdwmsri realized she had to find her own means of livelihood. But she had few options. It was then she met a lady from her village who promised her a good job in Guwahati.

THE PERILS OF URBAN WORK

Both nervous and excited, she took up work as a poorly paid maid in several households. She also worked as a baby-sitter in one home - until she was molested by the landlord and forced to flee to a friend's home. Even the busy city traffic made her anxious, and once she was nearly run down by a speeding bus. Dismayed by what she saw as a harsh life in the city, Swdwmsri longed to go back to her native village and her favourite activity - weaving the traditional patterns and motifs of her tribe, the Bodos. But like many women displaced by climate change, she found she had few resources or options to improve her situation.

Then one day, as she was waiting to catch a bus, she met an old acquaintance. Bimala, another migrant from Bijni, said she had been able to return home and find work with the Roje Eshansholi (Beloved Weaving) Cooperative Society, a weavers' collective based in Kokrajhar. The cooperative, set up by schoolteacher Malati Rani Narzary, seeks to create alternative work and dignity at home for impoverished Bodo tribal women vulnerable to climate change-related displacement, ethnic conflict, and human trafficking. "I realized that Bodo women ... were some of the finest weavers in the region," Narzary said. "I decided to hone their weaving skills to suit the demands of the national as well as the international market." After initial training, weavers and spinners in the program are separated into self-help groups that work in their native villages.

SPINNING A NEW LIFE IN MUGA SILK

From a modest beginning of only five members and four looms in 1996, the society now has over 1,000 women beneficiaries in Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon and Chirang district, some in very remote areas. More than 500 spinners and 50 weavers work in muga silk, the traditional golden silk of Assam. Young girls like Swdwmsri and Bimala are allowed to stay at a women's residence at the project's headquarters, where they feel at home and secure. "We send part of our earnings to our families. But we would rather stay here and do what we enjoy most - weaving," Bimala said.

Fashion designers now visit the weavers to help them create new products that will sell well. Swdwmsri remembers how a lady from the National Institute of Design in the Indian city of Ahmedabad came to relate that their traditional handloom material has been turned into scarves, cushion covers, curtains, table mats and other goods. "I have never used a table mat in my life. But I am happy that my handmade products adorn the homes of the rich and the famous and even plush hotels in big cities," Bimala said.

Narzary's aim of giving Bodo weavers a larger platform for their efforts has taken shape in the form of the Bodoland Regional Apex Weavers and Cooperative Federation, an umbrella organization for all the weavers in the area. The organization has helped weavers showcase their products in trade and textile fairs and fashion shows.

"I feel proud that apart from preserving our age-old weaving tradition, we are also able to hold back our young and vulnerable girls from working as domestic help in big cities. Moreover, they cannot be lured by the unscrupulous middleman and end up in brothels," said Narzary, who is chairperson of the federation.

Teresa Rehman is a journalist based in Northeast India. She can be reached at www.teresarehman.net

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Young girls face trafficking as lack of rain drives worsening rural poverty

By Teresa Rehman
NALBARI DISTRICT, India (AlertNet) - The rescue of 17-year-old Nitumoni (name changed) from a brothel in Shillong city recently points to a new danger as climate change takes hold in Northeast India - trafficking of vulnerable women.

Nitumoni's widowed mother, from Madhupur village, used to work as a daily wage labourer at rice fields in her village, near the Bhutan border. But as groundwater dries up in the region and rains fall short, farmers are giving up rice production, leaving families like Nitumoni's without work and struggling to make ends meet.

So when a distant relative offered to take Nitumoni to Shillong, the capital of neighboring Meghalaya state, to work as a domestic helper, her impoverished family agreed. But the girl instead ended up in a brothel, before being rescued recently by police. This has raised new worries about the dangers facing young girls as their already poor families struggle to cope with added burdens brought on by climate change.

"It dawned on me that climate change had much broader implications than it appears. Issues like human trafficking come to the limelight only when such an incident takes place. Otherwise, nobody wants to talk about it," said Prithibhusan Deka, president of Gramya Vikas Mancha, a non-profit local development organization. Many young girls sent from poor homes to find work end up trafficked to India as prostitutes or poorly paid factory workers, she said.

The organization is now working to fight the problem, which has been growing in remote villages badly hit by erratic rainfall and near-drought situations, she said.

GIRLS SENT TO CITY AS FARM INCOMES FALL

"This raises questions about human trafficking in the name of searching for alternate means of livelihood. We are conducting a baseline survey of young women, mostly climate refugees who are trafficked and forced into sex work in big cities in India. It is very difficult to get accurate statistics as nobody wants to talk about it. But we know that there are middlemen who are operating in these areas," Deka said.

In a growing number of villages in Assam, groundwater levels are very low and farmers are dependent on natural rainfall or dongs, traditional water channels that are the main source of irrigation and drinking water. The age-old water management system is particularly important to the most thirsty villages in the area.

Dongs are akin to small dams built on a river, with water diverted through canals to fields and backyard ponds. But gradually even the dongs are now drying up. Due to rampant deforestation in the foothills of Bhutan, heavy rains during the monsoons now carry rocks, soil and silt that block the dongs, said Ramani Thakuria, a senior agronomist at Assam Agricultural University. And in winter, the systems increasingly run completely dry, particularly as rainfall becomes more erratic.

As a result, farmers engaged in water-intensive rice cultivation have been severely affected, with many now moving to cities in search of new work or sending family members there to supplement falling incomes on the farm.

Nitumoni, her family's oldest child, was sent to the city to help support her mother and younger siblings, according to police who raided a brothel, rescuing a number of young girls.
Alarmed by the growing poverty-driven trafficking problem, Deka's organization is now working to introduce technology to help farmers earn more income at home.

Under a "rice intensification" effort, families in 100 villages in Nalbari and Baksa districts in Assam are getting training in how to grow rice with much less water and commercial fertilizer. The system, developed in the 1980s in Madagascar, has been successfully used in other parts of India.

"Water shortage and erratic rainfall is a global phenomenon due to climate change and we expect this to continue. We will have to improvise our agricultural methods accordingly to cope with the vagaries of nature," said Ramani Kanta Sarma of Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Nidhi, an Indian development NGO that gives training on rice intensification techniques.

The organization, which began introducing the system in Assam two years ago, plans to have trained farmers throughout the state within three years, Sarma said. This new technology has produced an enthusiastic response from farmers in some of the state's poorest and most remote districts.

"As community water resources were drying up, many of my fellow farmers were contemplating giving up rice cultivation. But we are looking forward to this new technology now," said Basistha Talukdar, one Nalbari district farmer.

"We have to arrange for our own water," added Ananta Kalita, a young farmer from Teteliguri village, near the Bhutan border. "There is no system to procure water from far-off places. We will have to make the best of what we have."

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