Abstract
Traditional craft practices in India are recognised as an unorganised sector which is sustained by its own internal system of community knowledge that is often tacit in nature and consists of flexible modes of production. The market does not recognise this internal organisation, which leads to inconsistency in income and increases the dependency on the intermediaries. While several studies available address the livelihood concerns and the design intervention made in the craft-making process, there is limited research on how organisational support can be introduced in the sector without disrupting the modes of production. The paper chooses an organisation called iTokri as a central case of a decentralised, craft-based e-commerce initiative. The objective is to highlight how an organisation through its operational choice can help the growth of the sector without relying on a top-down framework. Using interviews, workflow mapping and publicly available data, the paper examines iTokri’s workflow as a learning model to enable the communities to retain their control over their craft process and founding organisation around their artisanal practice. This helps in providing a framework for future organisational thinking in informal sectors that are intrinsic to culture. Understanding and reinterpreting what it means to organise the otherwise unorganised practices. The paper emphasises the means of retaining ethos in community-based structure in traditional craft production by comparatively analysing myriad secondary cases as relevant examples to support the claims.
Presenters
Anu MahatoStudent, PhD, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India Shatarupa Thakurta Roy
Associate Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
UNORGANISED CRAFT SECTOR, DECENTRALISED ORGANISATION, TACIT KNOWLEDGE, ARTISAN AUTONOMY, COMMUNITY-BASED
