Hetvee Panchal

4130-B

As we delve further into the neighbourhood and our networks, we come to understand who are the main actors of the industry, exactly how it functions and so on. There is an extensive cloth network in New Faisal Nagar. Various activities around cloth are stitching, sewing, selling bales of cloth, handwork, karkhanas, steam pressing, trimming and finishing work just to name a few. This network envelopes different members of the community like the men who normally own the karkhanas, homemakers who work from home and to whom the karkhanas outsource their work, women who conduct coaching classes and entire families who are experts at handwork. They work from home and many even run karkhanas from home. Their timings are flexible however; a general time is from nine in the morning until eight. Some even prefer to work late in the night. It is a highly social network. Outsourcing of work or taking up new assignments largely depends on prior relationships. This is especially true for women where they usually take work only from people who are their relations, like uncles, brothers and so on. Women prefer working from home where they can do it at their own convenience while simultaneously taking care of home and children. They usually work in the afternoons during their leisure time. Recently the network has fallen prey to GST and Demonetization. It has degraded to a level where it cannot support even a man’s daily needs. Work is slow to come by and many believe they are suffering only because of the new BJP government.