Pak Migrant Women Artisans Cluster

The Challenge

Pakistani Hindu migrant women in Jodhpur’s settlements carry traditional embroidery and appliqué skills passed down through generations, but had no organised way to turn that craft into a stable income — no training in market-ready design, no access to buyers beyond their immediate neighbourhood, and no institutional support to formalise their skills into a livelihood.

Our Response

UJAS organised the women into the Pak Migrant Women Artisans Cluster — 20 self-help groups, close to 300 women, across settlements including Pal RIICO, Bheelo ki Basti, and Gayatri Nagar. Working with Udhyam Protsahan Sansthan (the Industries Department of the Government of Rajasthan) and the District Industries Centre, the project ran a multi-year programme of soft-skill and design training delivered by the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Jodhpur: five soft-skill trainings and four design-development trainings, each spanning ten working days, training 225 artisans in total between October 2020 and September 2022.

Field teams supported the cluster with 600 visits over the reporting period, and organised two exposure visits (December 2022 and April 2023) to established craft clusters elsewhere, so artisans could see similar cooperatives already selling at scale.

Reaching the Market

The cluster developed 15 new product models — roughly 350 pieces — carried to national fairs and exhibitions for display and order-taking: three EPCH virtual fairs and an IHGF virtual toy fair in 2020–21, the IHGF Delhi Fair in both 2021 and 2022, stalls in Mumbai and Delhi, and the Paschimi Rajasthan Udyog Hastshilp Utsav in January 2023. A federation of the SHGs was also formed, with registration as a formal society in progress, to give the cluster a lasting institutional home beyond the life of any single grant.