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LIVELIHOOD

Handlooms in the hills

RUFAYET Ul.lAH MlBDHA, back from Rangamati
In the morning chill in the hills, Malati Chakma was knitting a Pinon, a traditional shawl, on her house premises.
The tribal housewife in Rangapani village under Rangamati district was looking to her halcyon days ahead.
Now she can easily earn a handsome amount a month as her business is going fine following an increase in demand and prices of the clothes she makes.
"I don't face any problem in paying the tuition fees of my college-going son and a school-going girl, as my income is good now," Malati says.
She says she can earn Tk 10,000-Tk 15,000 a month from the sales of the clothes -- mainly shawls, t-shirts, scarfs and skirts.
The amount is enough to manage a four-member family in the remote hilly area, she says.
Malati is one of many such knitters of traditional clothes in Rangapani village, a few kilometres away from Rangamati Sadar, where most are dependent on this business.
In the village, almost all the 750 families have handlooms, as this is their main business for livelihood.
The villagers say the demand for such tribal textile products is increasing now, thanks to the media hype, aggressive marketing, improved infrastructures, and of course development of the tourism sector that attracts a flock of tourists to the scenic Rangamati.
It takes 10-15 days to work on a Pinon, as it needs some fine-tuning.
The makers say they have to spend Tk 6,000-Tk 7,000 for pur-
chasing raw materials to earn Tk 10,000-Tk 15,000.
But doing business in such a remote area is not so easy, as they have to face the troubles of inadequate raw materials and absence of a big market near the villages.
The manufacturers buy raw materials, mainly white yam from Chittagong and Rangamati districts, and later dye the yam with their indigenous set-up.
Sometimes individual knitters work for the suppliers when any showroom owner places orders for a big quantity of tribal clothes.
The marketing of the tribal garments takes place in different ways. In most cases they sell their products directly to the tourists from their houses.
Almost all the knitters keep some extra products in their houses so they can instantly sell those to the tourists.
Some of the indigenous people have their own showrooms in Dhaka, Rangamati and Chittagong. They supply the products to their showrooms or work for others' showrooms on contract basis.
"The media have played a pivotal role to make die products popular to the people across the country," says Rani Chakma in Rangapani village.
She says they can make new designs from the ideas they get from the television channels' programmes as cable TV and electricity are there.
Recently a lot of showrooms have opened around the tourist spots of Rangamati due to a higher demand for such tribal clothes among the fashion conscious people.
The people in the hilly regions now can easily travel to remote big wholesale markets to sell their
products because of the roads and other communication infrastructures developed recently.
Financing the tribal people remains a big challenge till now, as many of the knitters cannot go for big venture despite having both capacity and higher demand for their products.
Sometimes they take loan from local non-govemment organisations at high interest rate, or borrow from their relatives to run the businesses. Bank credit is still far away.
A showroom owner at Tabalchhari, a market mainly for the tourists in Rangamati town, said the sales of traditional tribal garments peak up in November, December and January as the number of tourists increases during this period.
reefat@thedailystar.net