Anchal

The Anchal Project creates alternative, sustainable avenues of employment and income for exited or ready to exit sex workers and other distressed women. These unemployed, socially and economically marginalized women are trained to produce Kantha embroidery work.

Approximately three times per week, these women get together and learn how to make quilts and blankets from old sarees. Each blanket comprises of five or six layers of gorgeous old sarees of different colours and patterns, resulting in a beautiful handmade, one of a kind, product. Part of the money earned from the sale of blankets goes back into the training programs and to purchase additional materials while the rest goes directly to the women, as their income. The women, for the first time in their lives, have an entirely independent and sustainable livelihood that is based on skills and dignified earning, away from sex work and its associated stigma. This program has been designed and guided by a group of RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) students of textile design and sustainable development.

The project creates alternative, sustainable avenues of employment and income for exited or ready to exit sex workers and other distressed women. These unemployed, socially and economically marginalized women are trained and equipped to produce Kantha embroidery work. The project uses the traditional creative skills to develop marketable products, household utility items, out of old, discarded saris, dhotis or other soft clothes by embroidering them together.

For trade enquiry :info@newlightindia.org