Poverty and Design Explored: Context India

Image: Dr Sam Wong speaking to students at NID in the DCC class about design for sustainable development

Poverty and Design Explored: Context India
Last week we had a couple of visitors to NID, both looking at the macro issues of design and development as well as how we at NID looked at these same issues from our perspective of many years of experience of using design for situations that addressed rural poverty and design policy at the national level. Dr. Sam Wong from the School of Earth and Environment who asked us a question about our methodology for village intervention with design for sustainable living. Dr. Wong is on his way to Rajasthan to conduct a first hand study of development opportunities in rural areas and to look at the various roles for design in that process. This gave me an opportunity to reflect on the various projects done at NID over the years from the Jawaja project, through the Chennapatna toy project to numerous textile design projects such as the Dhamadka Block Print project and more recently to our “Katlamara Chalo” project that integrates bamboo cultivation with product manufacturing as a means to alleviate rural poverty using local skills, resources and local enthusiasm as the primary resource. In my reflections we were able to discuss and build a more generalized sketch model (shown above) that explained the process leading to the selection of the village through research and the building of an understanding of the context from which a number of design opportunities are identified and modeled before they are taken through a participatory development process that used the local strengths and resources in a sustainable manner, all with a design strategy layered with design thinking and action that is aimed at creating the product innovations and business models that could bring self reliance and sustained development to that particular situation. This process has been repeated many times by our students and faculty teams at hundreds of village centres across that country in numerous crafts pockets with a great deal of success. Unfortunately not many of these projects have been published although they are all live examples of success of such design interventions in the field in a very complex social and economic milieu that makes up the India village situation.

Image: Gisele Raulik and Darragh Murphy speaking to NID students in the DCC class about National Design Policies and their research in India and elsewhere.
The second visitor was Gisele Raulik Murphy, a design researcher from the SEEdesign Programme of Design Wales at Cardiff who is visiting India to examine the contours of the Indian National Design Policy and compare it to those of Finland, Brazil and South Korea. Gisele and her designer husband, Darragh Murphy, had an occasion to talk to my students in the DCC Foundation class about design policy, design promotion and design support programmes in many countries that they are researching just now. Gisele had invited me to the conference that she had helped organize on Design Support that was conducted by Design Wales in 2004. My paper on the status of design business in India can be downloaded from this link here. (conference paper 39kb pdf and visual presentation 573kb pdf) Her current visit to NID and India gave me the opportunity to share our thoughts and ideas about design policy and on my personal views about its larger role in India. I am eager to see her interactions with Indian designers and design administrators compiled and discussed in her forthcoming report and to review her insights through her extended study of a comparative analysis of numerous design policies across the world.

The way economists use the term planning today it seems that they do not take into account the various processes that we consider to be at the core of design as explained above, particularly, that of the core design ability of visualization through which design intentions are made visible to all stakeholders before the matter is taken up for sustained implementation with zeal and local participation. The economists prefer to use statistical and mathematically modeled projections and verbal constructs which do not touch upon the core areas of realisable innovations and this is an area that I think that design can help in bringing about a better understanding of even statistics itself. The work of people like Richard Saul Wurman and others in the field of information architecture and data visualisation have touched upon this use of a specific design ability to make visible, structures and forms of processes, situations and happenings, all explored in many complex manifestations. There are many other areas that design can be used in the planning and decision process of governments and industry where it is not used today and this is very evident to me each time i look at the work of our Indian Planning Commission and its publications. These bodies are filled with economists but at many times they seem to have very little faith in imagination and the creation of new and innovative offerings that the situation really affords, at least in my mind this is true. I do believe that these are not adequately addressed due to lack of understanding of what design can do in such situations by being a part of the process from the inside and designers too have not taken on the task of making all these possibilities visible by their own work due to lack of involvement, engagement and of funding at one end and stark apathy at the other. Many designers have taken the easy path of doing what they are told to do by their corporate masters who use their skills to slick up annual reports or company brochures.

I do feel that we need to raise this debate and explore the various roles of design and its potential application that is today ignored by design education and practice alike, including my own school, and we may need to raise that debate at a global level so that a new sense of commitment is brought into the use of design in areas far outside industry and business, and that is one of my objectives in setting up this 'Design for India" blog in order to create a platform from which I can share my thoughts on the possibilities that I see. I also find the peer review system of the research publications as not so perfect although it does work wonders for science analysis and knowledge creation but it may be extremely defective for design demonstration since the idea of “design opportunity”, a very specific term, as a combination of perception and imagination, excludes the viewer or reader from "seeing" the imagination part of the designers statement and therefore it compels the designer to take the idea far down the visualisation path before it can even dawn on others that the idea is truly credible. This means that we may need to create a platform or even many platforms for design incubation and development that can be accessible to many across numerous areas of application and need and these kinds of platforms just do not exist in India today, or if it does, it is dominated by administrative controls that stifle innovation and exploration which is critically needed to make the demonstration. Even at NID, our policies for faculty research and action are very restrictive and the sanction mechanism through administration is very stifling indeed. Some of us have had to battle hard to achieve a small degree of autonomy of action and this is not a good climate for addressing these complex problems which surround us here in India in an effective manner.

Jeffrey Sachs, author of “The End of Poverty: How we can make it happen in our lifetime” and Director of The Earth Institute, is an economist and a respected guide of many International programmes but I fail to see any signs of his deep understanding of design and innovation as we understand it today and here we, as designers and design teachers, have the task of educating our economists and the United Nations and World Bank statesmen, about the possibilities of design use just as the science community has managed to do over the past few hundred years of demonstration and application, their message to the world. This is where I feel the design policy of nations need to be directed to look at areas of real value and I am trying to get the attention of the Government of India to this possibility and to its potential in India and thanks to the internet we can make these statements directly today through our blogs (if managed properly) and I am aware that these have an impact, almost as much as any message in a peer reviewed journal such as the Design Issues or some other such respected platform with a claim of being scientific, but the challenge and problem is located in how we can get the people who need to listen to this to come to the table when the dominating theme in India and the world over is still science and technology and also management top a large extent, while design is not at all a part of that agenda at the level of discourse at the policy level in our nation. Most people, including Sachs, seem to believe that giving “development aid” is the way forward to poverty eradication and the whole aspect of building self reliance is often underplayed or even forgotten altogether. Many NGO’s turn out to be self serving agencies where the dependencies that are built between the donor and the recipient gives the donor a life long kick that they are doing some good in the world as good samaritans while they are in actually serving themselves and their ego needs. It is here that Ravi Matthai’s advise that the interveners must be completely dispensible in the process of building self reliant communities becomes relevant as he had advocated when we entered the Jawaja Project in the early 70’s.

Rockytoy story: Reflections on the building of a micro-enterprise with design in India

Image: My father, M V Gopalan is standing in the middle dressed in white as always and my brother M P Manohar is the one on the right sporting a beard standing with colleagues at the factory with some of the wooden toys on display. This picture was taken sometime in the early 80's when I had returned to NID as a faculty.
Having written about the Lego story in my last post below, I felt that it would be appropriate to continue the toy-story thread with some reflections on my own life and my personal interface with toys and toy making. By the way, I was born in 1950 on the 9th November and on that same eventful day, according to Rene Spitz in his book “hfg ulm: The View behind the Foreground”, the Ulm School of Design got its name, a significant moment for design, the naming of the great school in Germany, not my birth. I was born in the humble house of a carpenter, nay a young engineering teacher turned carpenter-entrepreneur by choice and I am told on that same day the house and the factory attached to our house got connected to the electric power grid for the first time. It was also an auspicious day for all Hindus’ since Deepavali (Diwali – the festival of lights) happened to fall on that day in that particular year, which was the 9th of November 1950, I am told. My full name is M P Ranjan, where Ranjan is my first name and "M P" stands for my family name when expanded, but this is never used except on my passport document. "M P" stands for Mundon Pandan. My students call me "Ranjan", my first name and in most formal situations I am Prof. Ranjan or Mr. M P Ranjan. This is a very personal story.

Image: Rocking horses in wood documented in 1975 after I had changed the colour schemes and added polka dots to make them contemporary for the market
By the way, the toy factory was called "Modern Agencies" and was set up by my father, M V Gopalan, in 1942 in Madras in South India (now called Chennai) with a capital investment of Rs 350/- after he chose to “retire” young from his engineering college teaching job to become an micro-scale entrepreneur. I have not written about my toy experiences much before but I think that it is now time to add this dimension to my website and the blog. The toy factory made wooden toys and playground equipment and included toys for home use as well as many educational products and furniture for the local school markets, over 400 products were on the price list and as the factory grew it became the biggest toy company in South India with supplies going to all major cities of South India by 1964. At this time it employed over 400 full time workers and many others on contract labour who worked from their home and this community may have numbered over 1000 individuals who worked from home to carry out these contract tasks. The product line included papier mache dancing dolls, wooden toys, educational aids, school furniture, office and domestic furniture as well as flush doors and specialized industrial wooden products of many descriptions.

Image: M P Ranjan as a child and one of my favorite toys that was made in my father's factory and one that I got to redesign in 1974 when I returned from NID.
The product range, which started with Rocking Horses, in wood, were the most popular product line in the fifties and the early sixties, The other items included school counting frames using wooden beads, outsourced from the town of Channapatna in Karnataka State. The next most popular item that I remember is the Papier Mache Dancing Dolls that sold in the hundreds of thousands at local exhibitions and they literally flew off the shelf and these were all made by the contract craftsmen families living in the city of Madras, near Saidapet, Velecheri (near our factory located in Guindy) and some as far away as Royapettah and Perembur across the city and quite far away to the North of the city. My father was quite proud of the fact that he had managed to provide stable employment for so many people when getting an honest days wage was an uphill task in most Indian cities. In the late fifties he had set up a toy retail shop under the brand name of "Rockytoys" after the popular rocking horses that he had innovated and produced from 1942 onwards. He had designed his own jig-saw "machine" in 1942 that used a bullock-cart wheel that was used to power the cutting machine, which was operated by a person who turned the fly-wheel using a hand-crank, and a stout rope then transferred this power through a system of pulleys to work the simple “machine”. He developed a similar sand-papering machine and with these two creations set about the making of his single product, in those days, the hugely popular wooden rocking horse. The rocking horses that were made in the early days were sold in the city of Madras directly by my father who used to take the finished product on the back of bicycles and later in larger numbers on hand carts when the production and sale grew in response to demand and these were first sold directly off the streets and later in stores that kept regular stocks as the market expanded for these products.

Image: The old and new jeep toy as seen in the old Rockytoys photo album in my mother's house. The new jeep was a redesign done by me in 1974 and I will detail the design strategy and more about it in my next post.
From these humble beginnings his factory grew and prospered and the product range was diversified further into furniture and school equipment. Many new machines came in and the production then included the making of wooden components for railway coaches for the fledgling coach factory in Avadi, Madras and the manufacture of plywood flush doors using a new lamination technology that he learned from an Italian engineer, Bottichelli (pronounced Butty Jelley in those days). With the help of his expertise the company took up the fascinating task of building 14 plywood houses for the faculty and an auditorium for the experimental dance school of Rukmini Devi Arundale at the Kalakshetra Foundation in Madras. I was fortunate to watch these developments at close quarters as a child and to visit the construction sites with a sense of wonder at all this adventure in small-scale manufacture and entrepreneurship. This is a long story of entrepreneurship that has been repeated many times in India and it is a true rag to riches story that I will try to tell later in some detail when time permits. I did not know it then, but it was design and innovation that was the driver for my fathers efforts and when I look back I realize how fortunate I was to experience these events and I wish that many more of our young students in India would have such exposure which their schools just cannot or do not provide today.

From the perspective of my real world education the story gets interesting here, In 1964 to 1967 my father’s factory and his network of suppliers faced their first major labour unrest. The city of Madras and the whole of South India discovered Red flags and Communism in a big way and due to the associated trade union action and the factory was closed down for over a year and then in smaller sessions due to the labour strikes and follow-up court action. Needless to say my father lost all his money. I was 14 years old then and old enough to understand first-hand what he was going through in his moment of crisis. Some production however continued through the network of outsourced contract labour and his business survived (another long story waiting to be told) and as a result I decided in 1968 not to join either the local Engineering College or the School of Architecture, where I had obtained admission after completing my one year Pre-University course from the prestigious Madras Christian College at Tambaram. My childhood education was the best that money could buy in Madras in those days. I went to Church Park, Presentation Convent at Thousand Lights in Madras for my junior nursery to fifth standard classes (seven years of Convent education by Irish Nuns - my language competence came from here, I am sure) and then to high school at the Madras Christian College High School as Chetput in Madras where I did engineering as my major subject. However, I now realise that I had lived a double life, one with great schooling and academic rigor and the second with a terrific grounding in real world skills at our factory and our business on toy design and manufacture and marketing. In 1969 I applied to NID’s Post Graduate programme in Furniture Design as an "Experienced Cabinet Maker" after working full time with my father in his business for one year, although I had been involved in his business already from 1964, if I look back and my childhood experiences.

Image: A collection of toys made during the "Bamboo Boards and Beyond" project at NID in 2000 as part of the range that I designed based on my Rockytoys experience.
At NID most of the products that I designed as a student were for children, I made a stackable fibreglass chair and table and prototyped it in 1970, a Tier-bed for children in metal tubes and wood which was knockdown and many toy ideas that were sketched and built as concept models. In 1972 I was inducted on to the faculty at NID and I decided to follow my growing interest in research and education and my disillusion with Indian business climate as a whole from my early experiences in the field. I hit a road-block in 1974 when I was asked to leave NID abruptly, in my view unfairly, but I had no option but to go back to Madras while I continued to argue my case with the then NID management for redress. At Madras, I realised later, that this was a blessing in disguise, a trial by fire if you will, and I set up my own design practice from my bedroom and using my fathers phone, I took on all sorts of design assignments on the basis of my very broad education and exposure at NID, interiors, Graphic print brochures and symbol design for a local advertising agency and exhibition design which resulted in a very healthy cash flow, far in excess of my NID salary. In the nights I worked on design of a new range of wooden toys for my fathers factory to pay back for the lunches, dinners and for the roof over my head. In two years at Madras I had designed more that a hundred new toys (some redesigned or with new colour-schemes) and this transformed the profit profile of our company and our sales from the Rockytoys Showroom sky-rocketed in those days, thanks to the design inputs which became visible and appreciated due to the real demonstration that was taking place. But I was however restless and continued to follow up the NID dream. I was finally re-inducted at NID on the faculty in 1976 and among the first project that I took up independently was the Chennapatna Toys collection for the crafts community there with sponsorship from the All India Handicrafts Board (now called the Development Commissioner of Handicrafts, Government of India). The toys that I designed then are still in production at many centres across India since they are made using wood turning and are easy to make and sell with very little capital to start a new company. In the bamboo range we have designed many toys and children’s furniture, which are now being promoted as poverty busters that can help Rural India survive the globalisation pressures. I now realize that I had intuitively embedded certain qualities into the products that could support start-up entrepreneurship and this is perhaps the reason why these products are made and produced at so many locations around India by small producers who like my farther have tried to find their feet and survive in a situation of poverty and absence of capital.

My brother, M P Manohar took over our factory and businesses after my father passed away in 1988, since he was already helping him for many years in the business at Madras. However the manufacture of wooden toys was coming under serious competition from plastics and the labour situation was not easy either nor did our family have the capital to grow the factory to the next level of sustainability with the introduction of automation and new quality standards that markets demanded and it was therefore closed down and eventually sold out in the mid 90’s. My brother continues to live and work in Madras (Chennai) and is now with the Dakshin Chitra Foundation to help build a Toy Museum at the Foundation's exhibition site outside Chennai. My brother too had studied with me through all the schools, just one year behind me in a junior class, and then he too joined NID as a student of Graphic design in 1973 although he too was a skilled craftsman having made over 100 or so Aero models, ships and many many other things together through our very rich childhood experiences together, including plastic scale models of architectural projects and buildings which my father had started as a side business to the toy factory. Life was tough but we can now look back and cherish the finer points of the rich experience, no regrets whatsoever. My mother too had joined the family business when the going got very tough in 1964 and stayed on with the shop in the city till my father passed away in 1988. She now lives in Bangalore in her own home near that of my sister (M P Meera - Meera Nandanan) who also lives there, having moved back from Kolkatta to Madras and then to Bangalore after our business was closed down in the mid 90's. She too contributed and managed the Rockytoys showroom during her stay at Madras from the early 80's. So in all it was a true family saga that needs to be told in some detail, hopefully sometime soon, with pictures.

This is a short version of our Toy story and I think that it is now time to blog my experience on toys and to share my experiences. By the way, since I got passionately involved in each of my activities as they unfolded I used to be called "Dr.Toy" by my friends and acquaintances in the early 80's before I moved on to acquire new skills to become "Dr. Geometry" and "Dr.Computers" "Dr. Publications" and now-a-days "Dr. Bamboo" and "Dr. Design Theory"....... By the way, I have never completed any degree qualification in my entire career but I have managed to attract these taunts, nevertheless.

Revisiting Chennapatna Toys after 30 Years: DCC students return with insights & current status.

Revisiting Chennapatna Toys after 30 Years: DCC students return with insights & current status
Image: Ranjan with students of NID Bangalore just back from a field visit to Chennapatna Toy cluster
This is a story that needs a bit of historical background. I was assigned the task of visiting Chennapatna as a young faculty from NID in order to assess the development needs of the crafts community there and to suggest the way forward with the use of design, This was in early 1978 and the client was the All India Handicrafts Board and its Chairman in those days was Mr L C Jain who being rooted in the Gandhian tradition was well suited to empathise with the needs of the crafts community across India and as a visionary he saw a role for design as well in this and his views on the subject are clearly expressed in his paper in Seminar titled “Securing the Future”. I met L C Jain later in the year thanks to the enquiry regarding the study of bamboo crafts of Northeast India which I had already started preparing for in late 1977 by visiting the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, and as a result I was chosen to visit Kyoto, Japan to attend the World Crafts Council conference and got a briefing from LCJ on my way out to Kyoto. In Kyoto I met Kamla Devi Chattopadhya for the first time and on my return started the planning for the field survey for the study of bamboo crafts of Northeast India which became a book in 1986. At this time the Jawaja project was in full swing and Prof. Ravi J Matthai and his teams were in and out of NID exploring the role of design and management in the development needs of the rural producers in India under the initiative called The Rural University. Ravi had a clear vision that all those who intervened in the crafts sector should eventually withdraw if those who got the benefit of structured inputs were to learn to stand on their own feet. The Jawaja project had three major components, that of leather crafts, Weaving crafts and agriculture of local vegetables besides educating the craftsmen and farmers to learn to work together and to build skills needed to face the threats of globalization and urbanization which were both seen as major causes of disruptionm in the simple lives of the local people in Beawar and Jawaja. I was involved in the Jawaja project, once removed, as the faculty guide to Nilam Iyer who was responsible for the creation of the Jawaja leather bags and other products and our product strategy was informed by the insights gained through a number of crafts related projects that had been done at NID as well as my own life experience in my father’s toy factory before I came to NID as well as from 1974 to 76 when I was compelled to return home due to problems at NID.

Image: Naina Jain from the Handicrafts study group trtying her hand at wood turning at Chennapatna.

This is just to set the agenda for the Chennapatna Toy development story since it had as its basis the experiences mentioned above and these had influenced my views on the crafts sector in India and in the possible strategies that could be embedded into the design action so that the people involved could fend for themselves in the years ahead. I journeyed to Chennapatna by train through Bombay, Guntakal and Bangalore in the very hot summer months of 1978 and that too in an unreserved compartment and sitting on top of a berth in the Dadar Madras Express and ended up with sores from sweating all the way to Bangalore. However this did not deter me from taking the first bus to Channapatna on the day after arrival in Bangalore to see the famous crafts cluster for the first time. My father, who was a small scale producer of toys in Madras, had been using the Chennapatna craftsmen as vendors for wooden beads that were used in the educational products such as counting frames and abacuses that were supplied to schools from our factory. Further, he had landed a very major contract in the sixties for supply of turned wood containers in rose-wood to a German importer, again as a vendor of the wooden parts which were further processed with the addition of metal components and finishes all done at the German end. From this experience I had a sense of the value addition that came to vendors and the high potential for exploitation in such ancillary relationships, although it did provide a sense of security and sustainable employment for the producers which may have been illusory in the long run. The power equation was sharply in favour of the buyer and not the maker-seller in this relationship.

I studied the existing producers and categorized them into three broad groups, namely, small hand-lathe user producers, small and independent entrepreneurial mechanized lathe users and the semi-organised small scale factories which employed 30 to 50 craftsmen and purchased from a number of contract producers as well. There were also the traders with shops and national linkages who purchased in bulk and distributed across the country and all of these had certain products which suited their financial and technical abilities. The small hand-lathe producers could make very small turned wood parts, usually from branches and converted these into very small components such as beads on a string (sold in 100 lots) and small pencil caps with face painted for effect, a child’s stationary product. Most of the others produced decorations for export and the shaking head dolls with spring inside (crudely attached with rusted metal nails) and the then popular “Choppu Set” – a typical Indian kitchen set of vessels and grinder aimed at the girl child in rural and urban India. There was the occasional train and car whose wheels came of if the child were to play with it and the user of rusted nails was a common feature, no-one seemed to care, and the products sold well. I decided to demonstrate the role of design by embedding desirable qualities (which I now call the Iceberg Factor) both visible (aesthetic and manufacturing quality) and invisible (empowering features that helped the crafts man ward off exploitation by the market forces and the established supply chain) which was a stated objective in the Jawaja leather products as well which were articulated in my conversations with Nilam Iyer during her Diploma Project at NID.

Image: Turned wood rattles designed and prototyped at NID in 1978: Design: M P Ranjan, Craftsman: Dalsukhbhaui


Image: Race Car prototypes made in 1978 and the first batch produced in Chennapatna in 1980 for the CCI Exhibition


On my return to NID after the survey I decided to develop a product strategy that made sense in the context of seeding entrepreneurship amongst the Chennapatna craftsmen as wee as to embed the qualities that could make it sustainable, particularly in a socially relevant sense. I chose to design toys that could be made and sold directly by the producer with very low marketing overheads, no advertising, no retail shops, no middlemen, say from the street directly to end users in Bangalore or Mysore, both 40 km away from Chennapatna and well connected by bus. Further the products had to meet the category quality requirements to compete with products from other producers such as wood, metal and plastic toys on the basis of performance alone. Further the product category had to be perrinnial in nature and therefore toys for infants was taken as the area of exploration and in this category I wished to show that design could help produce market variety as well. The area of wooden rattles was chosen and many sketches were derived based on my past experience with selling toys in my father’s toy shop called Rockytoys in Madras. These rattles were to be offered in three finishes, the first range using only natural wood and no finishes, the second using stained and dyed white wood and the third with the traditional lacquer finish. I did not offer any painted decorations on the surface since I would leave this to the sensibility of the individual craftsman who would then differentiate his product with his own offering of decorations. The first set of prototypes were made in the NID workshops by the mastercraftsman Dalsukhbhai and I had experimented in our dyeing studio to explore the staining finishes that we were to propose to the Chennapatna craftsmen when the products were launched. However this took place only in 1980 when the CCIC New Delhi decided to support an exhibition-cum-sale of four crafts that were awaiting formal launch after the respective design tasks were completed and prototyped. These were the Chennapatna Toys, the Pipli Umbrella collection, Leather products from Kholapur and Cotton Durries from Panipet. Thjis gave me the possibility of traveling again to Chennapatna with a firm order for supply of a batch of toys from several producers and this visit was used as a training module to get the craftsmen that were willing to produce these on their existing lathes. When the first batch of toys came in to NID there was a great deal of excitement since we had managed to break a jinx of many past projects when the prototypes are the end stage of the design collection which was then destined to vbe shown in numerous exhibitions but very few of these made it into production since the producers could not take them up due to many market related factors including risk, lack of finance and tested markets, lack of conviction in the products or not appreciating the potential demand that the designer had in his imagination.

Image: C S Susanth, Coordinator of Retail Design Experience programme with two new rattles produced at Chennapatna. These toys provide a better ROI to the crafts producers and offer a direct access to markets.

I have not been to Chennapatna after this visit for over 25 years (except my visit in 2004 for the Handmade in India field study) but I have been getting samples of my products from many centres across India and I am gratified that the products are still in production 30 years on and that they have been transmitted to the other wood turning centres such as Banares, Udaipur, Etikopaka and Calcutta. These products have been through a degree of metamorphosis in the imitation and reproduction but they have helped many generations of entrepreneurs to move out of poverty and go on to other activities. My students from the Bangalore centre visited Chennapatna yesterday and brought back images and samples of products being made there and two of the products show traces of their origins in my design collection of 1978. One other product that I had designed was intended for the larger producer with many power tools at their command and this was the toy Racing Car which required a more sophisticated method of production as well as the use of several jigs and fixtures if they were to be made in a high quality. All products were made using all wood construction without nails or glue so that the craftsmen would be insulated from the usual supply chain of the bazaar traders. Of the products that the students brought back from Chennapatna the toy rattles and the tops gave the craftsmen the highest margins and they could be sold off the street as was originally intended, giving a very high rate of return if they were produced in an entrepreneurial manner and marketed by the producer himself or by his family. The lessons of Chennapatna and Jawaja do show us that design intentions embedded in the design process can indeed bring sustainable results as well as promote social equity which can help offset exploitation and promote self-reliance and confidence building in our huge crafts community across India.

References
L C Jain, “Securiing the Future”, in CELEBRATING CRAFT: a symposium on the state of handicrafts, SEMINAR 523: New Delhi, March 2003 (see SEMINAR article here)

Prof. Ravi J Matthai: The Rural University : The Jawaja Experiment in Education Innovation, Popular Prakashan, New Delhi, 1979 (more about the book)

Image: Prof M P Ranjan at NID Bangalore Centre

M P Ranjan< "Craftsmanship in Education: Towards a Creative India in the Knowledge Economy" NID, 2005 (download word file here: 165 kb)

M P Ranjan, "From Craftsmen to Craftsmanship: Towards a Creative India in the Age of the Knowledge Economy", NID, 2005 (download pdf file of visual presentation 486 kb)

M P Ranjan, "The Thick End of the Wedge: Skill Building to Support Livlihoods", CEE, Ahmedabad, 2005 (download paper as word file 35 kb) and the two part pdf visual presentation here Part one pdf 2.6 MB and Part two pdf 2.9 MB)

M P Ranjan, "Crafts Study & Design: Some Case Studies from NID", A lecture for students from NIFT at NID, Ahmedabad 1999 (download visual presentation as pdf file 3.6 MB)

M P Ranjan, "Chennapatna Toys: Case Study", NID, Ahmedabad 1999, (download visual presentation as pdf file 429 kb)