Fashion with a human face

Behind the glitzy shopping malls with fashionable garments and the glitter of catwalks, there are many who work silently. Among them today are the disabled too, who have discovered a new dignity of labour, reports Usman Faisal.

Rajiv Sharma

WITH the overly visible twitches of his face, Rajiv Sharma lifts the packet from his desk and utters 'Ehm' in a laboured voice. The 'Ehm' means the size ‘M’ for the T-shirt in the packet. From behind a nearby desk, the neatly dressed Zameer Julka picks up a handful of tags and tries hard to say something, but can't. The blue and white coloured tags bear the brand name ‘Harvest’ for the T-shirt Sharma is holding.

Sharma, 31, and Zameer, 32, are mentally challenged. Like 20 others with various disabilities they work in a factory that exports readymade garments to the USA and Europe. According to a study conducted by the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) two years ago, the garment industry is likely to provide 9,00,000 additional jobs between 2002 and 2005. NIFT's Garment Department head Rajesh Bheda sees Sharma and Julka's factory ‘Balloons’ and a handful of others who employ people with disabilities as the torchbearers of a silent revolution in the making.

"The garment industry will be able to give 3 per cent of the 9,00,000 additional jobs to the disabled, thus rekindling the lives of thousands who otherwise would be depending on their families for their survival," says Bheda. The 3 per cent, Bheda calculates, may be too few for a disabled population of 16 million in India, but it far exceeds the percentage of disabled people employed by other industries in the prosperous private sector.

A study by the National Centre for Providing Employment to Disabled People (NCPEDP) a few years ago found that in the top 100 corporate houses in the country only 0.4 per cent employees were people with disabilities. In the Balloons factory, situated in a congested village of South Delhi, 40 disabled people work in the assembly line. Sharma, one of the nine mentally challenged employees, matches the polythene packets with their corresponding T-shirts from among sizes ranging from small to extra large. Like Julka, Sharma, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has been getting a stipend of Rs 1,200 in the past one-and-a-half years.

At Balloons, the disabled employees handle almost all jobs from stitching to packing. They manage sewing machines and even the cuff and collar turning machines. Recruited with the help of its own voluntary agency Disha, Balloons puts them through a brief training before they are sent to the assembly line. "During the training, each person is identified to do a particular job according to his or her abilities," says Rashmi Paliwal, who owns Balloons.

"They are trained to do a particular job in the assembly line, which is consistent with a quality product that can be sold in the international market," says Bheda, who recently conducted a workshop for exporters in New Delhi about the benefits of employing disabled people following a request from their American buyers.

Four years ago, NIFT began its dream project of employing the disabled in the garment industry when it asked two of its students to undertake a study to see if it was possible to successfully train them for the industry. "We received two volunteers from the Blind Relief Association of India and took them to our workshop and the Balloons for a two-week training. We were amazed how soon the two blind men picked up the work," says Bheda. NIFT commissioned another study by its students two years later to see how the disabilities affected a person's ability to do some kind of work. "We understood that we could do a matchmaking, like finding out what kind of ability is required of a job and match it with a disabled person."

Bheda, who wrote to several garment exporters about the project, found that the exporters were willing to employ people with disabilities if they were sufficiently trained to do some task. "Not all the exporters were keen, however. Some said they didn't want to employ these people because that would unnecessarily attract government inspectors who would come to find out if they worked in the best conditions. Some others said productivity would suffer," recalls Bheda.

The eight disabled employees working in RMX Joss in New Delhi's Okhla Industrial Area are no less productive than the other employees, says its proprietor Suresh Dhir. In fact, people like Bheda, Dhir and Paliwal have found that these employees have a better sense of discipline and commitment to work than other workers in the industry. "The hearing impaired are prone to less distractions than other normal staff. That is a plus point because generally the garment industry workforce in India is not highly efficient," says Bheda.

Vijay Gupta, 35, who is blind, operates the cuff-turning machine in Balloons, slowly moving shirt cuffs into a press to give them a definite shape. Gupta's four other similarly affected colleagues, including Ram Prakash Gupta, 55, who lost a leg in an accident when he was only 18, operate a collar-turning machine together. "We all excel in certain tasks. That is our ability," says Paliwal with pride, who won the Hellen Keller Award for her contribution to employing disabled people four years ago.

They are gaining in dignity of being useful members of society. They realise that they are working just like the others," says Paliwal, who with Bheda is collaborating in a project at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, to develop a button-holing machine that can be handled by a blind worker. Says Paliwal, "If we can train the visually impaired people, imagine the number of people it will help get jobs." TWF

HOME