By : Muruganandam Basuvaiyan
Company : Titan
Location : Hosur
Valuable contributors : Naihad Mohan, Sathiyaseelan S, G Rajendran, Elangovan A
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Project Meadow is one of the key projects being driven at Titan Jewellery Division which aims at ensuring better livelihood through engagement of rural women with jewellery industry by endowing them with necessary support to function as a self help group.
Meadow aims at ensuring livelihood of rural women by imparting education and jewellery making skill, making them self-sufficient to take care of their family. Uneducated young women, widows and mothers from Krishnagiri district are the prime focus group for this project owing to the close proximity to Titan's existing manufacturing setup. After counselling the families these women were brought to Hosur and provided required infrastructure. These women were trained for 2 years in the skill of all aspects of jewellery manufacturing like Stone sorting and bagging, waxing, benchwork, stone setting and polishing by skilled karigars. Allowing them to compete with the best vendors in India, the Best Vendor award bagged by Meadow is testament to this fact. They have formed a self-help group and themselves function as owners of the company, taking responsibility for profit sharing and recruitment of new members. Two-hundred families from rural Tamil Nadu are benefiting from this initiative.
Inauguration of the new Production Unit
Meadow Jewellery Production Unit
C.K.Venkatraman addressing the Project Meadow employees
Mr. G.Rajendran, Head of Manufacturing & Mr. Elangovan with the TBEM team
Project Meadow Team
How it all started
Titan started its manufacturing setup in a small village bordering Karnataka, with the help of the Tamil Nadu government. Women in rural India are continuously plagued by social stigmas like female foeticide, limited access to education and poor social standing. The situation in Hosur, Krishnagiri, was no better. Traditionally, women in these villages worked as daily wage workers earning a mere INR 700 per month with minimal say in the day-to-day activities of their families. The traditional and social mores never let them improve their consciousness, self confidence, and their situation remained pitiful. Child marriages, female foeticides, lack of education - all contributed to their woes.
Incidentally, taking a look into Titan's business; traditionally, jewellery has been manufactured by karigars with a family lineage in jewellery manufacturing. The lack of skilled karigars has been a persistent problem in jewellery manufacturing. Karigar attrition had resulted in huge loss for the company, and Titan was looking for alternatives. Thus, ideas started propping up that resulted in mutual benefit. The Meadow project aims at transferring jewellery-making skills and knowledge to underprivileged women and training them in the same, allowing them to become self-sufficient, gain confidence and progress in their personal life.
Building trust
The success story of Meadow was not written in a few days. It was built block by block, step by step and today has become a livelihood for hundreds of families in Krishnagiri district. But the job was no less demanding.
The project is primarily focussed at widows, single mothers and uneducated women with no support from the community. As a first step, help was taken from an NGO named 'Myrada' to identify the women who were worst affected, like widows and school dropouts. These women were the only bread earners for their family. They were confined to their homes, not being allowed to go out and look for opportunities to progress. They used to work in fields or in other households to make a living. They have not been used to work in an organised way and hesitated to go out of their villages. Titan along with Myrada volunteers went to their villages and counselled the family members and relatives of these women, took them to the Titan factory and explained the working atmosphere. An assurance was given for taking care of all the initial expenses and stay and a commitment was made to change their lifestyle.
But there were bigger challenges ahead. Since these women were from remote villages, they had little knowledge of jewellery manufacturing, and it was very difficult to train them. Understanding the job, knowledge of hand-skill and language were also barriers to training. Training involved a phased strategy involving specialised karigars being placed at Meadow for a full year, taking them through extensive training in all aspects of manufacturing. A new trainer was recruited and placed in Meadow itself. They started from the basic filling exercise and slowly imparted the technical training - starting from low cost 9kt jewellery, then to 14kt jewellery with low-cost stones and finally to 18kt jewellery with diamonds as they got confidence on working with expensive and delicate materials. And today, these once-uneducated women do all the jewellery operations from waxing to total jewellery manufacturing. They have now reached a level where their products can match up to the quality of any other core vendor. The Best Vendor award being bagged by Meadow is testament to this fact.
Results
Today Titan stands with the pride and honour of having helped women who were once sidelined by society to rediscover their lost self-confidence and imbue courage. Started with just four women, Meadow has grown to reach over 200 strong-willed women. 200 families have increased their monthly income from INR 15 per day to INR 7,000 per month. Today they work as a self-help group, in an organisation of their own called Meadow, which is run by the women themselves, and they make decisions related to their organisation, including profit sharing and further investment, themselves. The structure followed is eight board director members, four operation managers, and employees. Currently, 200 women are working at Meadow, performing all activities of jewellery manufacturing, such as waxing, wax setting, stone sorting and bagging, bench work, stone setting and polishing, along with all the systemised activities such as inwarding and dispatch. A production load is given to them, and upon completion of production and quality checks, the corresponding payment is given to the organisation, thus ensuring a regular stream of income to them. They are also ensuring conformity to all government norms and statutory requirements. This has allowed the women to contribute majorly to the upliftment of their community and village, provide good living conditions for their family and good education to their children.
Additionally, Titan Jewellery Division organises regular programmes for the benefit of the women employees, such as free medical camps, eye-check up camps and family gatherings. Hindi and English classes are organised for the women to improve their language skills and effectiveness in communication.
Titan believes in the virtue of serving society. As of November 2012, production worth INR 213 crore was completed through the Meadow team, which has resulted in a cost saving of INR 400 lakh. The forecast for 2015 showed overwhelming results of more than INR 900 lakh. Gold loss has been reduced from 3 percent to 2 percent, generating even more revenue. To add to this, Meadow is complying with all environmental and statutory norms. They do not use any hazardous chemicals in their process, and the disposal of waste is done in a controlled and environmentally friendly manner and by 2015, the benefits are to extend to 500 families in the district.
The journey doesn't end here. There is always a better way to do it. Continuous improvement has always been Titan's motto. Studies have already begun on how this model can be expanded to other karigarparks. Another major step is to equip Meadow with renewable energy, increasing dependence on solar and wind energy.
Mr Rahul Gandhi visited Meadow and spent two days interacting with the women and understanding the business model.
Succinctly, project Meadow has helped women to come out of the fields and to master the art of jewellery-making to produce world-class jewellery. The experiences of Meadow have proved that the philanthropic aspirations of a company or an institution can be achieved throughout the operations rather than just through donations. Meadow has not only transformed the lives of hundreds of people in Krishnagiri, but also the way corporates look at community service. Success depends on longer commitment of resources to help build lasting relationships. At the end of the day, one reaps what one sows.