SEWA (Self Employed Women’s Association) is a women’s trade union that works with over a thousand craftswomen in the Banskantha district of western Gujarat. The women working in different skills are further sub-divided into village cooperatives with locally elected craftswomen acting as the group leaders. These leaders distribute the work, make the first samples, control the quality, supervise production and monitor the payments.

DASTKAR, a registered society for crafts and craftspeople, helps with design, product development and marketing. For women whose only alternative source of income was road construction and work in the salt farms, their own creativity became a sustainable means to feed and educate their children, which has been an enriching and empowering experience in every sense. Rambhaben, one of the Aahir embroidery women, movingly expressed this when she said, “Today the lives of my family hang by the thread I use to embroider”.

The women involved in this project make different types of embroidered products:

• Clothes and decorative and ritual artifacts for themselves and their homes.
• Garments, soft furnishings and accessories for sale in the domestic Indian market through SEWA and other
  outlets.
• Orders for the export market.

Working Languages : Gujarati, English

Work with Mirror embroidered garments, soft furnishings, bead jewellery