From the archive
28 Aug 2026
On an afternoon in Indira Nagar, a neighbourhood in the border district of Barmer, several women gather in one small room with needles and bright thread, working through a batch of orders together. They move between one another's homes, stitching the traditional Sindhi embroidery their mothers and grandmothers taught them, fitting it into whatever hours remain after cooking, washing, tending animals and minding children. They are among thousands of Pakistani Hindu artisans who fled Sindh and settled in Rajasthan's border districts, carrying the craft with them.
Neeta Devi Meghwal's family crossed from Jhande Ka Tala village in Sindh during the 1971 war, when she was young. In Mithrau village, among the dunes, even drinking water was scarce; her father took daily-wage labour when he could find it, and her mother's embroidery became one of the only ways to feed the household. Meghwal learned it from her, taught her own daughter, and trained her daughters-in-law.
The Society to Uplift Rural Economy, known as SURE, has been training Barmer's artisans since the early 1990s, and in 2020 helped them incorporate the Thar Artisans Producer Company, owned and run by the women themselves. All 700 members hold identical stakes: each put in ₹500 for fifty shares at ₹10 apiece. They elected ten of their own as directors, vote on the business, are paid per order and stand to receive dividends, while SURE stays on only as management support.
For decades the women sold through middlemen who set the piece rates and kept the difference. Most earn about ₹150 a day, well under Rajasthan's ₹285 minimum wage for unskilled work, while a single embroidered cushion cover retails abroad for ₹800 to ₹900. Whether dividends arrive, and whether the company can hold its buyers without a new layer of intermediaries growing back, remains to be seen. But for the first time in three generations of stitching, the women in that small room are working for a company that is theirs.
An artisan-owned producer company holds together when every member buys in at the same price: 700 women, fifty shares each at ₹10 apiece, ₹500 total, and ten directors elected from the membership. Keep the supporting NGO in a management role only. Equal stakes mean no member can outvote the room.
Shareable · Read the source