shareable.net · 8 hours ago

Rajasthan's Cooperatives Are Helping Migrant Women Artisans Escape Decades of Exploitation - Shareable

For generations, Pakistani Hindu women who fled Sindh with little more than the embroidery skills passed down from their mothers found themselves stitching intricate, export-quality work for pennies - their craft feeding a $100 million industry while they earned less than half the legal minimum wage. The middlemen who controlled their access to markets kept them invisible, a arrangement so entrenched that, as Neeta Devi Meghwal recalls, "it wasn't just us; almost every woman faced such exploitation." Now, grassroots cooperatives like the Thar Artisan Producer Company are quietly dismantling that structure, making the women themselves equal shareholders and directors in the businesses built on their labor. After joining SURE, Moomal Meghwal described something that goes beyond a pay raise: "For the first time, it felt like we were getting the true value for our hard work." What these cooperatives are restoring, alongside income, is something harder to measure - the dignity of women whose hands have always held the skill, but who were never before allowed to hold the terms.