EMPOWERMENT, AGGREGATED

IN RURAL INDIA, WHERE ACCESS TO RESOURCES IS LIMITED, AGGREGATOR MODELS ARE PROVING TO BE POWERFUL TOOLS FOR ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT. THE QUESTION IS, WILL THEY SUSTAIN?

- Samali Basu Guha

Almost every home in Madhya Pradesh's Maheshwar, famous for Maheshwari silk-cotton sarees, has a loom. Most inhabitants of this town, around 90 km from Indore, make a living weaving single-colour sarees with vibrant borders and the traditional design of five stripes that run across the length of the garment. But 45-year-old Maheshwari weaver Mamta Chaudhry chooses to be different. Calling herself a 'designer' the single mother plays around with out-of-the-box designs in a bid to make her products more contemporary. And it is paying her rich dividends. While most weavers in Maheshwar make ₹8,500-10,000 a month, Chaudhry earns anywhere between ₹25,000 and ₹30,000.

On a humid Friday afternoon, at her six-loom facility in a dusty lane on the banks of the Narmada, Chaudhry—along with her all-women team of 11 weavers—is busy getting an inventory of sarees and dupattas that would be listed on Karghewale, a Maheshwar-based incubator and aggregator platform for weavers. “Karghewale has helped me sell my products to buyers beyond Maheshwar,” she says.

Nearly 500 km away in Nagpur, Delhi-based Racknsell is helping a small hardware store sell to the a big corporate based in Mumbai. The B2B e-commerce company, which has 4,000-plus suppliers on board—mostly small and medium-sized companies—purchases office essentials such as hand trolleys, stationery, wiring hardware etc., and then sells them to corporates.