Craft mela showcases deft skills of rural women

Rajendranagar: Celebrating yet another year of transforming vision into reality, the NIRD&PR organised the 17th Rural Technology Enabled Craft Mela on its premises at Rajendranagar, completely dedicated to rural women entrepreneurs from across the country. Squarely showcasing its vision of steering rural development ahead and encouraging women empowerment, the mela at NIRD&PR gave the rural women entrepreneurs yet another opportunity to display and earn profit out of their craftsmanship under one roof at Rajendranagar.

The five-day mela comprising a total of 230 stalls set up by self help groups from 122 districts in 24 states of the country displays entrepreneur skills of women folk. The exhibits consisted of pottery items, utensils, decorative planters, handloom dress materials, textiles, embroidery, jute and cloth bags, mosaics, Kashmiri shawls and dry fruits, savouries such as pickles (achaar), mixtures, sweets, brownies made up of jaggery and honey and other food stuff besides north east Indian stalls of wooden crafts and bamboo mannequins.

To promote a variety of fish food, fish delicacies prepared by different kinds of methods also added flavour to the mela here which was receiving a good number of footfalls. People from different walks of life and students of various schools and colleges, took part in the mela, were seen peering around the craft work of rural women and were left awe struck.

The stalls represented by the SHGs of 24 states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, Sikkim and Punjab beside south India states like Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and of course Telangana. The main attraction of the mela is the handloom, bamboo art and crafts stalls of north-east states of India.

The daily footfall of mela has been witnessing nearly eight to ten thousand. "The distinctive part of this event compared to the last one is, the number of craft stalls have been increased this time which are attracting more number of visitors. Especially the north eastern states stalls like wooden crafts, bamboo mannequins and savories," said Project Director Ramesh.