India's Oldest Carpet Manufacturing Company Records A Whopping 400 per cent Increase in Women Weavers

Fate Lines, a new show in Delhi that opens on July 10, will tell the amazing stories of women mastercraftswomen from India's carpet capital, Mirzapur.

Thanks to India's oldest carpet-making business, Obeetee, India's carpet city has become one of the best places for women to find work in the country. 

Obeetee started a groundbreaking female job plan in 2015 in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Since then, the number of women working has gone up by over 400%, making it a model for women in India who want to be financially free and independent.

In just 7 years, more than 1800 women from the towns of Mirzapur have overcome social barriers and centuries-old male practises to become master craftswomen who weave the most beautiful and complicated rugs.

Now, on July 10, a great show of carpets made by women in Mirzapur is going to open in Delhi's Bikaner House. It will tell the world about some of the most famous stories of women gaining power. 

Fate Lines: How the Thread Changed the Fate of Mirzapur's Women is a collection of 65 pictures taken by writer and photographer Kounteya Sinha in the heart of UP's silent villages. They tell the story of an amazing trip that Obeetee started to help women gain power. Chairman of Obeetee Mr. Rudra Chatterjee said, "We at Obeetee have been working with women for almost a decade to help them become skilled artists who make fine hand-knotted mats. We have taught nearly 1800 women how to make carpets, and they are all now weaving. Their model is important if you want to live on your own and be financially secure. We're proud of how hard they've worked and how much they've put into this programme.

Rekha Devi, who was 31 years old and from the town of Hirachak Dehria in the district of Bhadohi in Uttar Pradesh, could no longer take the shame.

Her husband was hooked to drinking and gaming. She was born in Nepal and had four children by the time she was 25. She didn't go to school and worked at home. "Every day, we would go hungry. My husband was a weaver, but because of his habits, he didn't work very often. He would go somewhere one day and then stay home for five days. I didn't know the local language and was desperate to find a way to get food into the house.

"I couldn't stand to see my children go hungry. I'd go from house to house and ask for money so I could buy food. Nobody helped. They said that I could never pay them back. It was embarrassing and hard work. Then I found out that Obeetee taught women how to weave carpets and paid them to do so. I decided to try it. At first, there was a lot of pushback, both from my family and from other locals. They asked me how a woman can leave her house and go to work. I fought it, though,"

Rekha Devi said.

Today, Rekha Devi is a master weaver who can tie an average of 8000 knots a day and works 8 to 12 hours a day in a weaving school that is run by the Obeetee. "I'm in charge now. Now, all four of my kids go to school. "Now I help people with money so they can run their homes," she said with a big smile. Rekha Devi's story is just one of many amazing ones that will be told in this amazing show, which will be open to the public until July 13. 

Mr. Gaurav Sharma, the Managing Director of Obeetee, says that when he started working in the carpet business almost 20 years ago, he was surprised to see that there were almost no women workers. "This was partly because boys were usually taught to weave and girls were not. But what was most important was that the town was run by a strict patriarchy. For me, this was not acceptable. As I learned more about village customs, I understood that women would never be able to work on commercial looms because they thought it was rude to sit close to men who were not in their family. 
That's when Obeetee came up with a plan to teach women how to weave.

"It wasn't all for the good of others. Weavers were leaving their jobs in large numbers, and many of them moved to the city in search of a better life. We did see that when these guys left, the women in the towns were left behind. These women were smart, wanted to work, and needed money, but they had no chance to do so. That's when we started the programme to teach women how to weave. When we first started the programme, it was not an easy road. Even though we offered free training and a small wage, no women signed up to learn. We had to work hard to get the village's older people to let women come forward. We chose to add a crèche so that young mothers would be more likely to come forward. "Once a few training centres started doing well, the programme took off. Over the years, we've seen this programme get better and better, and it never fails to give me a lot of hope and optimism." 

Sharma said.

Almost 1800 women have been taught to weave, and most of them are now great at it. We also found that women spent a lot of their money on their children's schooling and that they put a lot of money into their girls' education and health. The women's project is the heart of Obeetee right now, and it shows how important we think it is to work towards a more fair world.

Most of these women can tie up to 9,000 knots a day. Their work is so complicated that it can take anywhere from 15 to 300 knots per square inch and up to a year of hard work to finish. The Rashtrapati Bhawan, which is the most important home in India, has several of these rugs. One of them is over 450 square metres and has 100 million knots. Many of these women recently set a sort of record by dressing up India's most famous symbol of democracy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dream for India, an Atma Nirbhar Bharat (self-reliant), got the biggest vote of confidence when 900 weavers from the districts of Bhadohi and Mirzapur working for Obeetee spent a whopping 10 lakh man hours carpeting the Rajya Sabha and Lokya Sabha houses of India's New Parliament building.

On May 28, Prime Minister Modi will be the one to open the New Parliament Building. Weavers at Obeetee made 158 carpets for the Lok Sabha and 156 for the Rajya Sabha. They were then sewn together into a single carpet in the shape of a half circle to match the design of each House. This single carpet covers 35,000 square feet. Hand-knotting, an old and hard skill, was used by the weavers to make these beautiful works of art. The work is so intricate that as many as 120 knots per square inch were used to make the rugs, which adds up to about 600 million knots in total.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made it a top goal to get more women to work in India. He said that empowering a woman is the same as empowering a country. This is especially true in India, where 2 out of 3 women do not have jobs. Modi recently said that more women should be given the chance to become financially independent. He said that empowering women is important for India's growth. He said that we can't look at women as just housewives anymore; we need to see them as people who help build the country.

India does have a major problem with the number of women who work. Even though the country has been growing quickly, there are still not many women working in the business. The Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2020 found that in India, only 18.6% of women of working age work. This is three times less than what guys have. Bloomberg says that if the job gap between men and women were to close, India's GDP could grow by almost a third by 2050.

The CEO of Obeetee Retail, Ms. Angelique Dhama, says,

"We are happy to have a gender-neutral staff that values the skills of both men and women equally. At Obeetee, we teach both men and women to weave in the same high-quality way, and the products speak for themselves. All of our weavers are very good at what they do, and their work shows off their own sense of colour and style. In the past, when it was less usual for women to work, Obeetee took the initiative to help these women become financially independent and give them mental support. By giving women more power, we have not only helped them grow as people, but we have also grown our business. Because of the skill and innovation of our women weavers, we've been able to make more beautiful and interesting works of art for people to enjoy. Obeetee Carpets has always been dedicated to promoting equality between men and women and giving women more power."

We are sure that women should be treated equally in every part of society, not just where we work. We have been working to be more inclusive for a long time, and we will keep doing so by hiring more women workers in Mirzapur and elsewhere. By welcoming more women into the workforce, we are taking steps towards making it more fair and diverse.

Sinha says, "In 2015, the women of this area were doomed to a life of secrecy and isolation. But all of a sudden, in 2016, women started to fight against their families. They wanted to have their own identity. Some people stepped up and said they knew how to make rugs. Women from all the nearby villages started coming out as soon as they heard what was going on. Over 1800 women have become master weavers for Obeetee and make the most beautiful rugs.

My team of photographers, Rajendra Mohan Pandey, Nilayan Chatterjee, and Snehadeep Das, have taken a series of photos that will show the world the hidden lives of Mirzapur's women weavers. These women have greatly benefited from Obeetee's ground-breaking programme, which has given them a life of dignity and self-worth.

The art of making carpets has been passed down in Mirzapur since the time of Emperor Akbar. The story goes that Emperor Akbar, who was known for appreciating beautiful things, loved rugs more than anything else and chose to bring the best Persian artists and makers to India almost 500 years ago. When they got to Gopiganj, a small town in what is now Uttar Pradesh, thieves attacked their waggon. The few weavers who survived the massacre found refuge in the nearby towns. This made Mirzapur the centre of carpet weaving.

Three British businessmen started Obeetee around 103 years ago, right after World War I. The name of the company is a play on the letters of their three names.

Today, Obeetee is known as the place to go for the world's best and most detailed carpets and rugs. It works with more than 20,000 local artists to do this.ILO statistics show that in 2021, India had a lower number of women working than the world average, at 25.1%. Prime Minister Modi has told the government that it should have 50% women working for it by the year 2047."No country can grow and reach its full potential if half of its people are busy with non-economic activities," says the World Bank. It is thought that women in India give 17% of the GDP, which is less than the average of 40% around the world.

India is the youngest country right now because it has the youngest working population (15–34 years old) in the world. Economists think that the number of women working is a key sign of India's future growth.