 Craft Clusters and Work in Rural India: An ExplorationKeshab Das Working Papers from eSocialSciences Abstract: With the farm sector continuing with unimpressive performance in terms of the growth of value of output, agricultural infrastructure and also sustained massive rise in the landless agricultural labourers, marginal and small farmers non-farm employment remains a potential source of local income and job generation. As an important source of non-farm livelihood option in villages and small towns in India artisans - drawing upon cultural heritage, traditional skills and entrepreneurship – have relied on local resources and, typically, served local demand. While the number of persons engaged in the huge variety of craft clusters (both handicrafts and handlooms) spread across the country is substantial there has been a systematic policy neglect of the problems faced by the crafts as well as the craftspersons. That state policies have hardly helped preserve and promote craft skills and business is justified by the fact that there is no reliable and comprehensive official statistics on the craft activities and that implies whatever schemes meant for artisans or their products would not be reaching most of the craftspersons. [GIDR Working paper No. 237]. Keywords: Craft Clusters; Non-farm Employment; Raw Material; Institutions; Markets; Innovations; Official Statistics, rural India, craft activities, persons, schemes, skills, business, entrepreneurship, artisans, cultural heritage, traditional skills (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:11495 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from eSocialSciences |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.