It’s been a busy few weeks packed with several field visits to the Ahmedabad slums and villages in rural Gujarat. Something has been eating at me all week. And it isn’t whatever was in my bed at ‘Hotel Sketchy’ in Bordeli during my village visits last week.
It’s Shilpaben, a middle-aged woman who lives in the predominantly-Muslim slum of Juhapura on the southern side of Gujarat. To call Shilpaben a working mother would be quite the understatement. On top of working all day to provide for her family, Shilpaben helps prepare meals for some of her community’s most malnourished children as a member of Saath’s Jeevan Daan (literally “Gift of Life”) program. Just as a quick aside: Saath is one of the MFI’s that we’re partnering with, and their Jeevan Daan program helps mothers prepare more nutritious meals for their families, particularly by helping them understand which foods are both cheap and nutritious.
All day long, Shilpaben makes incense sticks, rolling them individually by hand. In a single day, she makes about 3,000 of them, which she sells to a wholesaler who packages them into boxes of 12 and then sells. For every 1,000 sticks that Shilpaben makes, the wholesaler pays her 12 rupees (about 25 cents), so she earns about Rs. 36 per day (75 cents). The wholesaler, on the other hand, sells boxes of 12 sticks for Rs. 10-15 (about 20-30 cents)…more than 70 times the price he pays Shilpaben!
As a result, Shilpaben is living on less than a dollar a day instead of potentially $50 per day (the price all 3,000 sticks at the wholesaler’s price). I’m both outraged and confused that a seemingly simple problem exists here (though of course I don’t know the whole story). Even if Shilpaben is a much better incense stick maker than incense stick saleswoman, isn’t there some amount of time she should spend trying to sell her sticks to consumers? Wouldn’t the incense sticks still fetch a good price if they were tied with a ribbon instead of put in a box? And if everything from milk to soap is sold door-to-door, why can’t incense sticks be too?
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