Menu
Rope making: the epitome of manual toil?
There are many natural fibres used for making rope, such as hemp, coir, jute, etc. 80% of coir production is done in India, and 80% of the workers are women. The industry of coir rope making employs 7.37 lakh people, most of whom are from the economically weaker sections of society.
“Earlier a truck filled with rope used to get sold within a day. Now it is taking 3-4 days to sell the same lot.”
There is no organised market for rope sellers, who roam from shop to shop to sell their produce. This has costs of its own, not to mention their additional costs due to the pandemic, which has reduced the demand for their business.
“All of us used to make ropes for a living. But due to poor returns only 22 families are making rope. Some of the others migrated in search of work.”
Though there are options for electrical and solar rope making, they are not affordable to most rope makers, and manual ropemaking is their only viable option- yet even for that, 3-4% of rope gets wasted per kilo.
How might we innovate better technologies to aid the rope makers in this post-pandemic world and help them make a stable income?
CatalsyeTech aims to foster an enabling ecosystem for innovation driven entrepreneurship at the bottom of the pyramid, to encourage and ensure participation of underrepresented communities.