We are happy to announce that TCN’s SEED Fellow Sufi Parween has won the 13th Laadli Media Award for her exceptional contribution to gender-sensitive reporting.
Tabassum Jabeen’s entrepreneurial journey began amidst the Covid lockdown.
Patna (Bihar):
A whirring sound from a nondescript building in the middle of lush fields breaks the silence of a pleasant winter morning in Islampur, a village 300 km off Patna, in West Champaran, Bihar.
Inside, dozen-odd men are busy sewing the next batch of kurtas, that should be ready to be packed and dispatched to a wholesaler in Ludhiana, Punjab.
Tabassum Jabeen, who is currently in Delhi for a personal visit, keeps track of the pace of work at the building over the phone. The 29-year-old native of the village set up this garment factory, called M2 Textile, in March 2020, when the national lockdown during the Covid pandemic caused her to lose her job as a fashion designer at a textile factory in Delhi. That end marked the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey. The Delhi-raised designer decided to go to her native village and turn the family-owned nondescript building on ancestral land into a state-of-the-art garment factory. “If you are skilled and determined, you can turn a disaster into an opportunity,” she says.
With a loan of Rs 25 lakh from The Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme, she bought a dozen sewing machines and hired an equal number of artisans from the village. The artisans too had returned to Islampur from different parts of the country, where they became unemployed during the lockdown. Like Ezajul and Murtuza, two men in their 30s, who were working in textile factories in Delhi and Ludhiana respectively. Since the time the factory was set up, they’ve been stitching garments, ironing them, and neatly packing them into boxes. And they have no plans to return to big cities for work. “We were paid about Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 a month there and were far away from our families. In Islampur, we are paid about Rs 20,000 a month and are at home,” says Ejazul.
To retain skilled and experienced workers, Jabeen lost no time in paying them competitive salaries. This, along with sourcing high-quality fabric, and selling the stitched garments at lower prices, proved to be a costly affair. In the first year of operations, M2 Textile incurred a loss of Rs 10 lakh.
Jabeen got Rs 25 lakh from The Prime Minister Employment Generation Programme which she utilised in her business. | Picture: Sufi Parween
But Jabeen was not going to give up. “I didn’t see the loss as a sign of failure. I was thinking long-term and knew my work well,” she says. The initial loss was an inevitability that she had factored in when she chose Bihar over Delhi, as the location of her factory. “In Delhi, I would have had to rent a room, and pay more electricity and other costs,” she says. It was also a return to roots of sorts, as her father had migrated to Delhi for a government job in his youth. Despite her education and training in Delhi, she decided to set up her factory in her village in Bihar because “it made business sense”.
In the second year of operation, i.e. 2021-2022, M2 Textiles, recovered from the loss of the previous year. This year, they expect to make an overall profit even as the sale in January touched Rs 7 lakh, the highest for them so far. The factory supplies readymade shirts, trousers, and kurta-pyjama sets to wholesalers in UP, Delhi, Ludhiana, and a dozen districts in Bihar such as Gopalganj, Siwan, Chhapra, Motihari, Bettiah and Raxual.
M2 Textiles run by Jabeen has all-men workforce. | Picture: Sufi Parween
The number of employees has doubled to 24 who are all men. Her next step is to hire women “who don’t step out of work in the village”. She is launching a skill training programme for women next month, including providing them with machines so that they can stitch at home and earn money.
“We look at ourselves not just as a garment factory, but also as a game-changer, that can generate employment not only for the village youth but also for women,” says Jabeen.
Sufi Parween is a fellow with the TCN-SEED mentorship program.
source: http://www.twocircles.net / TwoCircles.net / Home> Lead Story / by Sufi Parween, TwoCircles.net / March 08th, 2023
Aliah University is a state government-run autonomous university having three campuses in New Town in West Bengal. | Picture by arrangement
The inaugural batch of the nursing course in a university in West Bengal, designed especially for women, has achieved this success.
West Bengal:
Almost the entire batch of this year’s graduates of the B.Sc Nursing course at Aliah University have got job placements. Fifty-three out of fifty-four graduating students, mostly Muslim women have been selected as nursing staff in various medical colleges and hospitals run by the government of West Bengal.
This is the inaugural batch of the nursing course designed especially for women. It is for the first time that almost an entire batch of a program in Aliah University has gotten placement.
Aliah University is a state government-run autonomous university having three campuses in New Town in West Bengal. It offers undergraduate and postgraduate programs in different Engineering, Arts, Science, Management, and Nursing subjects. Previously known as Mohammedan College of Calcutta, it was elevated as a university in 2008. It is a minority institution and hence a majority of its students come from marginalized groups and communities like Muslims and lower castes.
Usha Mallick, the head of the department of nursing told TwoCircles.net, “This is an unprecedented success for the department of nursing because these are the first batch of graduates. We at Aliah University are extremely proud of our graduates who worked hard.”
“This kind of placement will get us a great standing in the state as well as the country. This is great news also because all the girls in this department, like most students of Aliah university, come from extreme socio-economically backward families living in remote rural districts of West Bengal,” she added.
Usha Malick is head of the department of nursing at the university. | Photo by author arrangement
“We are thankful to the Mamata Banerjee government for helping the university start the course, and to the National Medical College for providing practical training for nursing students,” she said while adding that Aliah is the only state university that runs a nursing course without its medical college and hospital facilities.
Educating kids from extremely backward districts like Murshidabad The news brought cheers to several young women. Lutfa Khatoon is from Murshidabad, a densely Muslim populated area (67%) where the state of education is extremely poor. According to Census 2011, the literacy rate of the district is 66.60%, which is far below the national average of 74.04% and the state’s average of 77.08%. The district holds the bottommost position in the rank of literacy rates since the Census 1951.
“In Murshidabad education is not the priority in general, let alone education of girls. When I got admission to the course, people in my area said I am getting training to become a nursemaid. My placement has broken that impression,” Khatoon told TwoCircles.net. She is posted in Murshidabad medical college and hospital.
Firoja, Lutfa’s batchmate, told TwoCircles.net that studying was not the only thing she invested hard work in. “These four years of the course people would come to my house in Murshidabad and taunt my parents that your daughter will be ruined because they gave me the freedom to move to Calcutta to study,” said Firoja who is posted at Anup Nagar primary hospital, Murshidabad.
She mentioned that she faced financial hardships but thanked the university for providing her scholarship.
Aatika, Lutfa’s classmate told TwoCircles.net that people in the rural areas of West Bengal say that “sending girls to the city for education is like providing them with opportunities to be spoiled.” But her getting a nursing job has broken the patriarchal mindset and inspired many parents to send their daughters to study.
“In my village, most people marry off their daughters after they pass the tenth class. I am very lucky that my family supported me. It is because of them that I got a very respectful job,” she added.
Oldest modern style educational institute in Asia The university is one of the oldest educational institutes in Asia. Established by Warren Hastings, the British governor-general of East India Company in 1780. Calcutta Mohammedan College, as it was called by Hastings. Established in the form of a madrasa school, it is one of the oldest modern-style educational institutions in Asia and the first of its kind in India. It taught Natural Philosophy, Grammar, Logic, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Arabic, Persian, Theology and Islamic Law, and Theory and Rhetoric.
Good career placement not new for Aliah University Dr Mohammad Reyaz, assistant professor of journalism at the university told TwoCircles.net that good career placements are not new to the university.
“Earlier it used to be a Madrasa. Not many people know that it has been turned into a university which offers courses in Engineering, Electronics and Communication, Business Management and nursing among other subjects. So these kinds of placements do help break the stereotype which tries to reduce the image of this premier institution as a madrasa. Not only do the students of nursing and engineering departments get good placements but students of the Arabic department also get jobs in prestigious firms like Amazon,” said Dr Reyaz.
Sufi Parween is a fellow at SEEDS-TCN Mentorship Program. Shentweets at@sufiparween84
source: http://www.twocircles.net / TwoCircles.net / Home> Lead Story / by Sufi Parween, TwoCircles.net / August 08th, 2022
