Channapatna- From Ground Up

Channapatna is a town located in southern Karnataka along the Bangalore-Mysore highway. It is famous for its wooden toys & lacquer ware since the time of Tipu Sultan. I can go on & on describing the town & its wares, but I’ll leave that to Wikipedia.

We conducted a sort of a Baseline survey in the town. We spoke to various artisans & others involved at different levels of the toy manufacturing process. I found the questions we were expected to ask to be limiting our interaction. Never the less I’ll state the ground realities we stumbled upon.

The Business:

• Local Turning or Manual Lathe: doesn't require much finish and mechanisation. Can be seen in the bead making village of Neelasandra.
• Fine Turning or Machine Lathe: for export quality products. It is a difficult task which requires a very smooth finish and no black patches on the wood. Requires the use of machines. eg. napkin rings made in Kalanagar.
• Fixing & Painting: Involves assembling of pieces created on the lathe, colouring & varnishing them. Seen throughout town in small houses.
  
• Cutting: making parts that don't require turning. eg. parts for toy horses.

More than 80% of the town is involved in the toy making industry. The toys are mostly made of ivory wood (halle wood), coloured using coloured lacquer sticks & polished with leaves of the Thale palm. The colour given to the lacquer may be a vegetable based dye or a chemical dye. Vegetable dyes are safer. Other goods include furnishings made from teak & rubber wood & napkin rings.

The industry in Channapatna is a dying one. From 3000 artisans about 5 years ago today there are fewer than 2000 who practise the craft. Government organisations like Cauvery & NGO’s like Maya have taken various incentives to save the craft with average results.

Some of the causes for its stagnancy are:

• Most of the labourers are illiterate daily wage earners. They are satisfied as long as they can feed their families & have no ambitions of expanding their craft or profit.
• The artisans maybe content but they see bigger dreams for their children. The children would prefer settled jobs rather than daily wage ones which are highly unpredictable.
• There is always a sharp deflation of prices in this industry. Any new innovations are copied & inferior duplicates are sold at less than half the price of the originals, thus keeping prices down.
• The number of large scale orders for goods has reduced drastically. This is mainly because the quantity of production of local handmade toys is no match for foreign (eg. Chinese) machine made goods.
• The nature of the orders is another limiting factor. The deadlines for orders are unrealistic & so are the prices. At times when there are no orders production cannot be stopped as it is a daily wage industry leading to unnecessary pileups of goods.
• Regular power cuts are another major problem. The machine lathes cannot operate without electricity. This leaves the artisans idle.