North India, Delhi
SEWA Bharat
New Delhi and its adjoining cities have several established and emerging textile and apparel manufacturing clusters. These clusters produce a wide range of fashion and home textile products for both the international and domestic markets and is largely dependent on inter-state migrant workers.
Homeworkers in Delhi-NCR perform a wide range of tasks on textiles and apparels such as cutting loose threads, embellishment, sewing patches, hand embroidery, hemming, attaching laces, buttoning and making buttonholes etc. These women are known to receive very low wages, irregular work and no social entitlements.
The Hidden Homeworker programme through its local partner in Delhi, SEWA Bharat, is engaging with homeworkers in communities near NOIDA on the north-eastern side of Delhi to improve working conditions of homeworkers and other informal workers there.
Through the Hidden Homeworkers programme, SEWA has been able to support home-based workers with trainings on mitigating Organisational Health & Safety issues, violence against women, their rights as workers, record keeping etc. SEWA also supports workers in accessing livelihood opportunities via Ruaab, which is a social enterprise run by community women with support from SEWA. You can learn more about Ruaab here.
SEWA Delhi has also been able to provide thousands of home-based workers support in accessing social security entitlements through the SEWA Shakti Kendra or SSKs. SSKs are run in order to empower communities by strengthening members’ capacities to access entitlements – through mobilization, building awareness, initial support and hand-holding and nurturing grassroots leadership. At SSKs, community members can get information on SEWA initiatives, government departments and schemes, and application support.
SEWA Bharat in Delhi has made great efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting homeworkers with basic household supplies, food, awareness programmes and worked with the government to ensure social assistance schemes were effectively delivered.
SEWA has been actively advocating for policies that will recognise Home-Based Workers as workers and provide them with equal rights. SEWA Bharat plays a pivotal role in all the national and international level networks for formulation of a national home-based workers policy.
SEWA Bharat in Delhi is part of the national SEWA movement and has organised over 40,000 women informal workers.
www.sewabharat.org and www.sewadelhi.org
Traidcraft India’s work in Gurgaon
Towards the south-western side of Delhi-NCR there is a well-known, largely export-oriented industrial cluster, namely Udyog Vihar in Gurgaon and many homeworkers in communities nearby can be found working on garments and home textiles, performing value-addition and finishing tasks.
In this part of Delhi-NCR, Traidcraft India is working closely with the homeworking community and some local NGOs to establish a grievance mechanism for informal workers and bringing the issues of home-based to the attention of brands and suppliers.
Please contact Traidcraft India to find out more.
Resources
The Delhi Supply Chain Workshop held in March 2023 focussed on the highly skilled embroidery and beading work carried out by many homeworkers in the Delhi-NCR region. Access the report of this event below.
Read our Summary of SEWA Delhi’s Baseline survey, based on interviews with 200 homeworkers in the apparel sector, many producing for global brands.
Find out more about Traidcraft India’s 2021 research, based on their fieldwork with informal workers in the apparel industry in the residential district of Kapas Hera, near to Gurgaon in the Delhi-NCR region.
