Katlamara Multiplied : Seeds of Design in Tripura

Katlamara, Mantala, Sankhela and beyond: Seeds of Design sown in Tripura

Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

NID and CFBI-NID team consisting of C S Susanth, Subroto Sarkar and Ranjit Debbarma with Prof M P Ranjan conducted a workshop in Bangalore for the IL&FS supported team of craftemen from Sankhala cluster between 17 & 30 September 2009. A new range of products were designed and introduced which the designers felt would be attractive for local markets in Agartala, hence the product range included a number of versions of the local favorite called “Alna” – a cloth rack that is ubiquitous in Eastern and Northeastern India, however these are always made from wood. However this time we decided to use a modular knock-down all bamboo chair as the vehicle for production training and through which the Katlamara and Sankhala craftmen could be introduced to quality control concepts from raw material to end product using good practices and a well designed workflow and management system. This training workshop was conducted from 18 May to 28th May 2009 and full size drawings of the chair design were distributed to both workshop participants as well as other entrepreneurs and craftsmen at Agartala, Nalchar and to the students at BCDI. The design strategy included elements of the micro-macro design approaches that we have been advocating over the years through the Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID to include detail design, product design, tool design, process design, brand building and the macro economic strategies of farm to market with many embedded links that makes the whole both complex and potentially viable in the face of multiple challenges in the area of design for rural development in India today. The IL&FS team is headed by Sharmishta Mohapatra who is supported by S Metoulebi at Agartala and Kirat Debbarma at Katlamara and Sankhela clusters.

Image01: What was a small farm over a couple of acres near Katlamara has now grown to cover 20 hectares of Kanakais bamboo located at Mantala about 5 km from Katlamara. The promise for growth of the bamboo products market gives the farmer in Manna Roy the courage to expand when all others around him are planting rubber. Only time will tell who will take the cake and eat it too.

“Good Design” – is like a fertile seed that is a product of human imagination and supported by deep convictions of experience from explorations that could be spread over the land to generate huge value for all stakeholders. Only when it is nurtured and cultivated does this seed generate value and produce a farm or a forest which is a manifestation of the seeds potency and this nascent value is quite invisible till it is eventually realised on the ground, a bit like the chicken and egg dilemma. This is why we as designers have to struggle to make our visions and convictions accessible and visible to politicians, administrators and industrialists – all those who need our services – and this will always be the case for good design. I believe this will be the case since these design actions are located at the leading edge of the future that we wish to build and these design intentions and the early actions that require support continue to remain invisible till these have sufficiently matured and manifested themselves in visible signs that are tangible and perceptible to onlookers. Even then many attributes and intentional relationships will remain invisible since these would need to be explained before they can be understood to be an outcome of our intentional thought and a product of the design process itself and not an inevitable happening.

Image02: This time, the ‘design seed’, is the newly designed bamboo arm chair that can be made from four major frames and two tie frames, all pinned together with pre-drilled bamboo dowels. No metal nails or screws here so all materials are from the rural farm and with the use of simple jigs and fixtures these frames can be drilled precisely for post-transport assembly at the point of use by the eventual buyer. This opens up the possibility for low complexity knock-down furniture that can be made locally and then shipped easily to all Indian destinations at a low cost. The designed seed that can transform the local economy and its inhabitants over the long term. Can we support and nurture this strategy?

In 1988 J L Naik and I had discussed this particular view of design as a concept for the proposed Eames Award Trophy and last month Naik gifted me a picture that he had taken of a seed that would be dispersed by wind with the fine fibres attached that can carry it far from the source tree in order to find fertile grounds in order to germinate at an appropriate time and climate. This is nature's strategy which works if sufficient seeds are produced that are viable and we too will need to work with those who appreciate our actions and wait for the climate to turn in order to realise our intentional missions. I am attaching below a picture that I had taken of Naik with his photo gift that I did use in a blog post earlier this month.

Image03: This design story is not about the chair but about the people who make and the bamboo products and they need to learn to do costing, learn the technology, and educate their children as well as make a reasonable living all at the same time. This is what the design schemes need to address in the face of all cards being stacked against the producers for so many years. Can the winds change and bring fresh perspectives to the remote land?

In Tripura this time we are trying to excite many producer groups in and around Katlamara where we started our major efforts several years ago with an outpouring of design offerings and this time Susanth and I are holding back our creative juices to make just one product in a systematic manner from raw material to end product using a well thought up process design through all the stages of production with the use of good practices that are articulated and captured in the form of jigs and fixtures which is the stress that we are making this time at the two centres of training in Tripura – Katlamara being one and the other a new centre of Sankhala, about 5 km from Katlamara. Both these groups are being placed in competition with each other, one at Katlamara with a wage compensation training scheme under the IL&FS programme and the other at Sankhela with piece rate offer only. The piece rate group at Sankhala seems to be more motivated, let us see how it develops as the year rolls forward from here.

Image04: Both groups cooperate to book a shared Jeep Taxi that transports ten craftsmen and fifteen new chairs from Katlamara and Sankhala to the rubberwood factory in Nagicherra to make use of their good quality spray painting facility. Lack of power and a compressor at both locations can be offset with a small investment in a micro-generator and a small compressor, all affordable if Government policy is swayed in that direction.

Like the metaphorical design seed that I have been talking about in the previous paragraphs I have been distributing full size drawings of the bamboo chair that I had designed specifically for production in rural settings using solid bamboo culms and poles of small diameter to many other potential producers – Sanjay Das from Nalchar, the other one is Bhola Nath Bhowmik of Agartala, son of the late Rathi Ranjan Bhowmik (who passed away recently) – Others who have shown interest are the Tripura Rubber Wood Development Corporation at Nagicherra near Agartala that is showing interest in development initiatives in bamboo cultivation and furniture production due to the interest of one of their senior techno-managers, Madhumita Nath whom we met at their factory. These chairs were showncased at NID at a number of exhibitions as well as in New Delhi at the Northeast Trade Fair and later in Germany at exhibitions in Berlin and Stuttgart through exhibitions organised by IFA. These experiences have given us the conviction that the market will accept these design offerings and we therefore have decided to transfer the designs to the field for use by our local craftsmen at Katlamara and Sankhela.

Image05: The closing exhibit was organized at the BCDI in Agartala much to the joy of the BCDI students and next day three collections were put up on show – The Bangalore Collection from the previous workshop, the Sankhala and Katlamara batch production of knock-down chairs and the new set of bamboo items from the rubberwood factory. The knock-down chairs were taken to the local courier bookong centres to get estimates for air shipment rates to Kolkatta, New Delhi, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Will this supply chain get rooted and help a local forest grow? Only time will tell.

We hope to see all of them adopting the strategies that we are advocating at Katlamara. This one chair is the seed of a much larger strategy of getting good production systems in place that can be applied to all the designs that we have in our rapidly growing archive of design offerings. I am attaching a series of pictures that are selected thumbnails of the last few days, one picture from each day, take a look, and I will be using these to tell the story more fully on this blog later this month. The two groups have produced ten chairs each using the production jigs that were introduced to them and the results are very encouraging indeed. Today, exactly ten days after we introduced the new designs to the two groups we brought the chairs to the BCDI campus at Agartala for an informal exhibition of the products of both our workshops with the IL&FS team. The products that were developed at Bangalore during the workshop at IPIRTI and NID Bangalore as well as these new batch produced chairs were placed on display at the BCDI which is another link in our micro-macro design strategy being the educational component of the larger plan for the bamboo sector as a whole. The students of BCDI were excited and they represent the future of the craft in the days ahead. Local officials from the Tripura Government came by and the trainees too had a chance to interact with all the visitors in a stage of high expectation and finally the film crew from the NMBA interviewed me at the BCDI exhibit venue and I hope our message reaches the cloistered heights of the National Mission’s headquarters in New Delhi.

Download "Katlamara Chalo" poster 2MB pdf
Download IL&FS Bangalore_NID IPIRTI Workshop Report 5.1 MB pdf.
Download "Katlamara Chalo Book as pdf 46.5 MB size"
Design for India: Prof M P Ranjan

CFBI-NID: Bamboo for Grassroots Development:

CFBI-NID: Bamboo for Grassroots Development:

CFBI-NID (Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID), Tripura Bamboo Mission initiatives: NID IPRITI IL&FS TBM – bamboo craftsman training initiative at Bangalore.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Image 01: Workshop commences at IPRITI, Bangalore with bamboo craftsmen from Tripura and NID designers with technical inputs from IPRITI scientists.

The National Institute of Design (NID) through its Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID) and the Infrastructure Leasing and Finance Services (IL&FS) entered into an agreement to develop and deliver a bamboo based small craft industry initiative as part of the overall mission objective of the Tripura Bamboo Mission (TBM) that is spearheaded by the Government of Tripura. The IL&FS has extended their technical, financial planning and manpower expertise in furthering the mission objectives of the TBM and they in turn have cooperated with the CFBI-NID to move the bamboo furniture and product design initiative through a project format that includes product design, craftsman training as well as field training that would help seed and incubate the new micro-enterprises in the State of Tripura.

Image 02: Stackable Café tables and benches, a local to local strategy offered by NID to kick-start local entrepreneurship in the Agartala region.

The NID had entered into a MOU with IPRITI, Bangalore earlier this year to cooperate in new initiatives in bamboo product development with a special focus on laminated bamboo and bamboo mat board applications in a number of fields. In mutual agreement with all the partners we decided to bring the project with the IL&FS to Bangalore since the NID Bangalore campus is located just opposite the IPRITi campus in Penea, just next to the large CMTI campus on the very busy Tumkur road. This proximity and an already agreed platform of cooperation opened a new window for bringing the IL&FS – TBM project to Bangalore campus where the faculty and students of the Design for Retail Experiences (DRE) discipline were keen to explore bamboo as a future material for eco-friendly retail environments.

Image 03: Rubber wood gussets and planks used to upgrade bamboo furniture form another leg of the NID design strategy to leverage the availability of this new material from local production facilities in Agartala.

IL&FS has identified nine master craftsmen from the Agartala region to partake in the CFBI-NID design development and training programme and along with these craftsmen an IL&FS supervisor was deputed to manage the day to day programmes with the NID Bangalore coordinator Divya Darshan and Joint Project Head and NID Faculty, C S Susanth from the NID Bangalore Centre. Prof M P Ranjan as Head of the Project stationed himself at Bangalore from 17th September to 30th September 2008 for the design development and training components of the project that is being handled under the management of the NID Outreach Department located in Ahmedabad while NID Bangalore handled all the local logistics and project support systems through Shashikala Satyamurthy and Centre Head S Goshal.

Image 04: The ubiquitous “Alna”, a local clothes rack, offered in new design configurations using rubber wood gussets to support the “Local to Local” design strategy advocated by NID.

Dr C N Pandey and his team were very supportive and provided the space in their well equipped Bamboo Development Centre for the conduct of the workshop as well as provided some key training inputs in bamboo treatment and finishes that was organized as associated demonstrations and lectures. The NID design team of Prof M P Ranjan and C S Susanth was joined by other members from NID Bangalore including Divya Darshan and Niju Dubey who participated in the design and training activities on a regular basis. Further, three NID students from Furniture design discipline joined the team as experimenters and occasional trainers and they too developed their own understanding of the new material through their association with the workshop, the results of which will be seen in the future, I am sure. Of these students, Garima Agrawal has chosen to take the bamboo project as her major diploma project and she will be taking this initiation and travel to the field to commence her research and study at Agartala in the near future.

Image 05: Exhibit of all new bamboo products developed at the design cum training workshop at IPRITI as shown at the NID Bangalore lawns for the closing function on 30 September 2008.

The design strategy outlined by the team this time looked at the building of products and systems that had a “Local to Local” character since the craftsmen while being very skilled at bamboo work were still to learn about being entrepreneurs and learn to manage a business enterprise on their own. The IL&FS and the NID design team are providing handholding and mentoring supports as part of the next stages of this project and in this the making of local products would bring a degree of self confidence to the crafts entrepreneurs since they could learn from direct experience and use their local knowledge to build their business experience. The major product category chosen for this strategy was the local “Alna” an ubiquitous clothes rack usually made in wood and found in every home in the Eastern Region of India as well as all over the Northeast of India. We therefore designed a wide range of “Alna” type products to demonstrate product diversification and the possibility of customization of a basic idea to generate variety. The other products included benches and tables that could be used in domestic situations as well as in local café’s across Agartala region, which by the way is a huge local market that is attracting many furniture makers from New Delhi and Mumbai. These are local opportunities that the Tripura craftsmen can learn to address in their process of learning a trade which they could then sharpen and refine to address more sophisticated markets in other cities in India as well as in the export sector, once their level of confidence has grown to manage these with comfort and quality.

Image 06: The closing function attended by Director IPRITI, Il&FS Managers, Coordinator Tripura Bamboo Mission, Centre Head NID Bangalore and Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID and the design and craftsmen teams.

Another major design decision was the use of rubber wood in combination with bamboo for several of the products. In an earlier collection we had designed all bamboo furniture as part of our “Katlamara Chalo” strategy where the joints were made using round holes drilled with a flat-bottomed drill bit and secured with bamboo dowels and bamboo counter pins. This joint was used once again for all the bamboo pole joints and all bamboo components were kept straight without the use of any bending that is commonly associated with bamboo furniture. The rubber wood components were of two types, plates for surfaces and shaped gusset members for particular joints between bamboo frames. This way the bamboo craftsmen could obtain the rubber wood components from the new and growing rubber wood industry in Tripura and offer value to their customers with the added functionality of smooth surfaces and precise gusset joints that are also visually modern. This strategy had us seeking the help of Sandeep Mukherjee for the precise manufacture of the gusset components, drawings for which were prepared on cad software by Niju Dubey. Several ranges of “Alna” were developed using these special gussets and as we go forward we anticipate an enlargement of the range with the addition of new components as dictated by the design scheme and the functionality required. The Tripura craft scene is now sufficiently sophisticated to accommodate this shift to outsourced components as they develop their marketing strategy in the days ahead and this would also help them fetch a better price in the market and provide value to the customer who is being exposed to many imported products of high quality.

Image 07: The new “Alna” and other products at the lawn exhibit at NID Bangalore for the closing function.

The training programme culminated in the production of several new designs that aligned to the product strategy proposed by the NID team and at a concluding function at NID Bangalore on 30 September 2008 we conducted an exhibition of all the products at NID Bangalore which was visited by George Jenner, Chief Coordinator of the Tripura Bamboo Mission, Sharmishta Mohapatra, Senior Manager and Advisor – Trade Facilitation, IL&FS, New Delhi, Dr C N Pande, Director IPRITI, Dr S Goshal, Centre Head, NID, Bangalore and all the crtafts trainees and the NID design team with the students of the NID Bangalore and they were hosted by Prof M P Ranjan, Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID. At the concluding function the dignitaries spoke to the audience about bamboo and its role in the future as well as the strategies of the Tripura Bamboo Mission and the plans and activities in the coming years. These provided new opportunities for all partners to use their skills and knowledge for the development of the bamboo sector in Tripura and in the process bring overall development to Tripura State, particularly in the rural areas that have been deprived of industrial development over the years. Plans and now afoot to send our teams to Tripura for the next phase of the project that includes the setting up of micro production units with the use of an appropriate set of hand held power tools and the hand-holding supports from the IL&FS teams in finance and marketing support in the field. NID designers will work closely with these craftsmen to realize the objective of getting these new products to market and in the process establish the confidence levels of the crafts entrepreneur as well as help maintain quality of production with the use of simple manufacturing strategies that are embedded in the design programme.

Prof. M P Ranjan

Design Happenings in Bangalore: Two Weeks at NID Bangalore

Design Happenings in Bangalore: Two Weeks at NID Bangalore
Prof M P Ranjan

Image 1: DCC models about food at NID Bangalore: Climate, Geography and Culture.

I have been in Bangalore, nay Bengaluru now, for over ten days and have been conducting the Design Concepts and Concerns Course (DCC) for students of three disciplines at the NID Bangalore Centre. The theme continues to be food and the assignments have gone through a small transformation. The first assignment had three groups looking at the macro aspects of food and the economy across the broad fields of influence under the heads of Climate, Geography and Culture. The first assignment ended with the three groups having explored the chosen areas through brainstorming and some supporting research ending in the production of a visually rich model that could help in the “visual sensemaking” process as defined by the NextD Leadership Institute.

Image 2: DCC team presentations at NID Bangalore

Each group came up with compelling presentations that revealed a great depth of information carried by the team members and they were all able to produce rich models and make their presentation to the faculty and students at NID Bangalore. The Geography group used a compact model of the continents which revealed both their knowledge as well as their areas of ignorance about the world of food, since the North American and European regions were better represented than the South Americas and the African continent. The climate group divided the world into zones along the longitudes and used one table surface for each zone to capture a picture book of “Poloroid pictures” just as a returning traveler would have shared their vast journeys with their clansmen in the past. The third group had everyone holding their breath with their stunning portrayal of culture using their knowledge of India and the variety of foods and their associations with religious and cultural affiliations. The three dimensional display was well classified and translated into banners each that covered one major category of food and a central display mapped the three major religions that dominate the Indian landscape.

Image: Neelam Chibber with Prof. Ranjan at NID Bangalore and with students of the DCC class.

Neelam Chibber who visited the NID campus briefly to see the bamboo workshop at IPIRTI across the street from the NID campus was quite taken in by the presentation of the culture group and she has commissioned the team to make a refined set of banners about food and culture for her new stores in the now revised Industree Crafts stores that are taking shape in her back office operation of scaling up and diversifying her already successful operation to bring value to Indian crafts at the grassroots level. The Industree Crafts Foundation as well as Industree Crafts Pvt Ltd is being transformed after taking strong roots in Bangalore and I will bring this story to this blog when Neelam is ready with her new and revised offering. Industree Crafts Foundation and the business wing Indistree Crafts Pvt Ltd. works on a Fair Trade principle with over 15,000 village craftsmen across seven states and the Northeastern Region of India and it grew from a small investment of Rs 12 lakhs (1.2 million Rupees) to reach a valuation of over Rs. 15 crores today and growing further by the day. Neelam worked with Gita Ram of the Crafts Council of India and Poonam Bir Kasturi in the early days to nurture a lofty thinking organisation and has shown us that design and social equity can bring good value for all partners. You can download a pdf article about their Fair Play principles from this link as a 688 kb pdf file titled "Fair and Just".

Image 3: Swiss design team conducting a workshop at NID Bangalore

The Swiss design team of industrial designer Frederic Dedelley and design journalist Ariana Pradal conducted a one day sensitizing workshop for all the students at NID Bangalore when they shared the Swiss Design experience through a slide lecture which was followed by a hand-on workshop aimed at creating a designer Letter Opener by direct action on materials and ideas. The evening saw an exciting presentation of over 50 different design offerings which were stimulating and showed the students the dominant design activity of product diversification with the use of micro detailing and form giving that are central to a designers bread and butter operation in their dealings with industry.

Image 4: Guided tour at the Swiss Design exhibit at Bangalore Max Muller Bhavan.

I got to visit the Swiss Design exhibition, Criss+Cross at the Max Muller Bhavan in Indra Nagar and also to take the guided tour offered by Ariana Pradal. I was joined by my daughter, a Bangalore based Graphic Designer, Aparna Ranjan in this very informative tour and later we sat together for a long chat with Frederic Dedelley on various issues and directions in design for India and the world.

Image 5: Bamboo workshop at IPIRTI with Tripura craftsmen for the IL&FS project.

The IPIRITI based bamboo development workshop had nine craftsmen from Tripura along with two of our mastercraftsmen working on my new designs that used a combination of bamboo poles and rubber wood components under the supervision of NID Bangalore faculty and long time bamboo colleague, C S Susanth. The IL&FS team included a supervisor and their senior officer S Matouleibi who manages the field activities of the Tripura Bamboo Mission in Agartala, Tripura. We developed a collection ten new designs with a focus on a “local-to-local strategy”, where we selected products that would have a ready local market in the Tripura region which in turn would facilitate start-up entrepreneurship amongst the bamboo craftsmen who need to develop their self confidence through some mentored development initiatives by the design and finance teams in the field.

Image 6: Visit to Quetzel Design Pvt Ltd

This project and the strategy to use some rubber wood components had me driving all the way across Bangalore from Penea to Sarjapur Road for a visit to Quetzel, a furniture design and manufacturing firm started by two NID graduates, Sandeep Mukherjee and Sarita Fernandes. The company has grown from humble beginnings to be one of the finest furniture manufacturing firms in India that can compete with the international brands that are now entering India across all the parameters of marketing and design. Sandeep and Sarita were both my students in the Furniture Design faculty and NID and I feel quite proud to see their massive and refined industrial venture which has been built at a time when design was ignored by both government and industry alike, which is something that I had called attention to in my paper of 2001 at the first National Design Summit organized by the CII and NID in Bangalore. My paper was titled “Cactus Flowers Bloom on the Dessert” to draw attention to the extremely hostile economic and policy climate in which design was passing through and things have not changed much even today, although we have come a long way as a profession today, but no thanks to either the government and to the established industry, who have steadfastly ignored the design community in India while they have run after international collaborations at a huge cost to our economy and to the tax payer alike. Download paper here 123 kb pdf file and visual presentation here in two parts: Part 1 – 3.6 mb pdf file and Part 2 – 4.6 mb pdf file

Image 7: Visit to Trapeze Design Studio at Koramangala

On our return from our long drive to Quetzel and back I took Matouleibi to visit Trapeze, a graphic design studio at Koramangala which was set up by two NID graduates, Sarita Sunder and Ram Sinam. An exciting small studio with a row of Macs on one side and an impromptu photo studio and a table tennis facility on the other. Trapeze has an impressive range of clients from across several sectors and their work in print and web design has set standards for Indian graphic design industry in spite of their small and cozy studio size and very personalized format of operation.

Image 8: Book launch function at Crosswords for Dr Darlie O Koshy and his book “Indian Design Edge”.

The week closed with another interesting event which I will write about in some detail in a future post since it will need the time and space to read, reflect and comment about, in a balanced manner, if possible. This event was the launch of the new book, “Indian Design Edge” by Dr Darlie O Koshy, Director, National Institute of Design through the Roli Books Publishers at an evening event at Crosswords Bookstore on Residency Road, Bangalore. The event saw the main speaker Dr Sadagopan, Director IIIT, Bangalore (Tripple IT Bangalore) wax and wane about the virtues of design from the aesthetics to the usability of the Apple iPhone and his profuse praise for Dr Koshy’s many achievements in his 8 year long career at NID as its Executive Director for the first five years and later as its Director for the past three years after a terminiology change that has left us all puzzled if it is a move forward for NID or not. I bought three copies of the book for myself, my wife Aditi Ranjan and my daughter Aparna Ranjan so that all of us designers could come up to steam quickly on Dr Koshy’s offering to the design publishing space in India, which by the way is very starved of any kind of serious publishing and this particular offering will be lapped up by the much starved Indian and international design public, I am sure. Dr Koshy is also a Board Member of ICSID, the International Council of Societies Industrial Design, and by the way my blog “Design for India” has been showcased by the ICSID blog in the education section last month particularly for the Tata Nano debate that it had hosted when the product was launched with much fanfare early this year. Ratan Tata has written the Forward for Dr Koshy’s book and the Tata Nano appears on the dust jacket as well as on the contents page of the book as a symbol of Indian design success.

Image 9: Visitors at the book launch function at Crosswords, Bangalore

There was a bash across the street from Crosswords organized by a local fashion group to falicitate Dr Koshy on his publishing achievement but I did not gate-crash this bash at the Taj Gateway but chose to have a quiet dinner with my daughter Aparna along with two very interesting young designers from France and Germany, two girls who have chosen to work in India since it offers them real challenges unlike the well established and stable design climate in Europe today. We sat a Coconut Grove and got a sense of what foreign designers liked in India and how they had coped with the challenges of Indian living, both rode mobikes in Bangalore and have worked for over two years in a umber of very interesting assignments here in Bangalore. I am sure India can accommodate may more such international adventurers in the 230 sectors of our economy that is today starved of design offerings due to policy myopia in government and in industry. The design scene in India is indeed changing rapidly and this si an exciting time to be working in and in writing about design for India. Mireille Arnaud, the girl from France, is working with some stone craftsmen from a village called Shivarapatna in Karnataka and she has helped them build contemporary concepts that can take their skills to new markets in India and overseas. This is the kind of cooperation that we had envisaged when Aditi and I had embarked on the research for the book “Handmade in India” in conversations with Jogi Panghaal one of our prominent collaborators and several of our faculty colleagues at NID. India can offer creative opportunities of Indian and international designers to work closely with Indian craftsmen to build a creative economy which could be the future for many of the Indian crafts if our policy initiatives are managed in the right direction. On the other hand, Christina Hug from Germany, is working as a creative director in a local design firm with her focus on graphics and communication having traveled to India after field experiences with the Greenpeace Foundation in many countries.

This week I get back to NID Ahmedabad with a good feel from Bangalore since so much has happened the past ten days and the stay was useful and productive. I look forward to returning soon to Bangalore, the city of Rain Tree avenues and a still wonderful climate, if we manage to keep it that way, Nano or no Nano!


Prof M P Ranjan