Weaving together equity and well-being

Members of Janapada Khadi centre during a nature study and trekking tour.

A weaver at work at Janapada Khadi.

For the past four years, Pallavi (28) and Sudeepa (32) have both been working as weavers at the Janapada Khadi centre in Melukote, Mandya.

Between them, the women have worked in government hospitals, garment factories and gram panchayat workers, before taking up weaving as a vocation. In Janapada Khadi, they have found an organisation unlike any other. Here, they are not just workers but also part owners of the enterprise - the result of an initiative that has been running for over a year.

“Everywhere else there is this divide that one person is the owner and the rest of us are employees. Here, all of us have invested 1/3rd of the money. Whether it is a loss or profit, it is split between three ways,” says Sudeepa.

Cooperative enterprises in the khadi sector are not new in Karnataka, but what makes the Janapada khadi unique is its focus on the well-being of its producers.

Unique model

Legally, Janapada Khadi is structured like a Limited Liability Partnership firm.

There are three stakeholders — a third of the investment comes from the Janapada Seva Trust, the mother organisation, one-third comes from the employees working there, and another third comes from the coordinators, who assume some leadership for the collective.

A part of the profit is used for the welfare of the collective's members - 25% goes towards the operative funds, 10% is used as a community development fund, 2% as a health fund, 2% as a bonus for non-investors, and 5% of the salary is a retirement fund with a matching contribution from the collective.

“There is a meeting held once a month where they tell us what the expenses of the organisation are, what revenue has come in. Since the past two months, the profits of Rs 1,500 have been credited to our accounts,” Sudeepa says.

Gandhian ideology

"Through Khadi, we are thinking of realising Gandhi's larger idea of a exploitation-free society," says Sumanas Koulagi, who completed his PhD from Sussex University and is heading the initiative.

Sumanas, who wrote his dissertation exploring the theories of the Gandhian economic thinker J C Kumarappa, has returned to Melukote to put some of these ideas into action.

To begin with, the enterprise has officially limited the number of hours of work to six hours a day.

The rest of the time is spent on personality-development activities. There are theatre classes, book reading sessions, potlucks, cinema and documentary viewing sessions.

“Here there are no fixed timings. I also like this job because it allows me to look after my two young daughters and take care of the responsibilities at home,” says Pallavi, echoing Sudeepa’s sentiment.

The most crucial distinction, however, is that the organisation tries to take decisions based on everyone’s consensus at least three times, before going with the majority decision.

Suresh works as a dyer at Janapada Khadi and also works on organic farming initiative of the Janapada Seva Trust. A resident of the nearby Huligere village, he has been working with the collective for 13 years, before which he worked at a garment factory in Bengaluru.

"In the five years I worked in Bengaluru, I used to spend what I earned just trying to survive and was hardly able to send any money home," Suresh says.

"Now I am looking after my parents in the village. Money isn't as important to me as the peace and happiness that I feel working in the community," Suresh adds, saying there is also a sense of relief now, when he looks at the fallout of the Covid crisis in urban areas like Bengaluru.

Small is beautiful

Janapada Khadi has also deliberately kept its scale of production low, strongly resisting the pressure on social enterprises to "scale up" or "branch out".

Raghu, a mechanical engineer by training, is one of the coordinators of Janapada Khadi, looking after their exhibitions.

"An organisation founded with a strong idea of what it is going to do, often loses its way and dilutes its ideology after more and more people start to come in and work there," Raghu says.

"If I pitch a machine that benefits a hundred people, I immediately get asked 'Can you sell a thousand pieces of the same machine?'. People think scaling is the only thing that is important but you have to understand that there are smaller organisations that work just as effectively" he says.

"Rather than just making the fabric, we also concentrate on building a non-violent community together. That is what khadi means. We have limited the scale of operations because chasing demand means we have to concentrate just on production, instead of most other things that we do," he adds.

Sumanas and Raghu both say that they work with a few select partners - Tula and Kandu - which are organisations that sell khadi clothes online, besides showcasing their work at exhibitions.

Decentralising capital

But do profits not matter? Can their ideas be replicated in spirit, if not substance, in the modern work culture?

"Their [Janapada Khadi's] work goes into the centrality of capital and shifts it to labour, which is what cooperatives also do," says Professor M S Sriram, the Chairperson of the Centre of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru.

Professor Sriram says that Janapada Khadi's model might be "extremely difficult" to replicate in organisations with "multiple deliverables and multiple objectives" including profit.

These organisations, Sriram says, often extract profit in multiple ways, whether through capital, labour, technology, raw material, utilities etc.

While an organisation might do good on some of these factors, it usually scores terribly on other aspects. For instance, there are e-commerce companies that place customer satisfaction above all else, but might be terrible for their employers and producers.

"The overall Gandhian thought process, even if you go back to Hind Swaraj, is not anti-profit. It is not even anti-business, or anti-trade," says Sriram. "It just says, 'Don't be extractive anywhere' and Janapada Khadi is as close to that Gandhian spirit as we see"

But isn't the Gandhian aversion to machines, a luddite spirit that Janapada khadi embraces, a bit utopian for the 21st century?

"It looks utopian because their rhetoric and work goes against the dominant mode of production. But if you are looking at it from the long-term perspective of ecological balance and having inter-generational equity, one of the ways it manifests itself is by rejecting technology," Professor Sriram says.

“They are not a bunch of academics sitting and trying to think through what might be a theory of decentralisation. They are unique because they are trying to develop a theory of decentralisation through practice,” says Deepak Malghan, one of the authors of The Web of Freedom: J. C. Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle for Economic Justice, a biography of J C Kumarappa.

“They are trying to conceive and demonstrate an alternative to mass production and mass consumption,” Malghan says.