The vulnerability of people had increased not only due to shock of floods but the people also lost small assets. In addition opportunities to cultivate and work as agriculture labour were also lost. Declining trend of food consumption (frequency of intake of meals per day) was also noted in the villages (especially among women) where people have just returned from the displacement. The small village based entrepreneurs such as carpenters, cobblers, craftsmen, blacksmith, small shops, carts etc.
Mostly people especially women of the areas are linked with big markets through the middle men who also provide them financial support; in return he offers them very low prices at exploitative terms. The middlemen give less than 50% market price to these craft women. The role of middleman current is that of exploiter rather than that of supporter and facilitator. As most of the women are very poor, vulnerable, illiterate and unaware of the market dynamics .
The proper linkage with the market will benefit the home based workers in two ways. On one hand it will help the home based workers to get the higher prices/value for their products, on the other hand support them getting cheaper raw material from the market. As per current practice the middlemen provides raw materials at higher rates and gets the products at lower rates.
There is an urgent need to put check on the middlemen and diminish their role for the benefit of the Home Based Workers .were diminishing the role of the middlemen will greatly bring the value addition to the products of the Home based workers. provided by them such as business development through micro credit and capacity building.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
