SPINNERS’ WELFARE

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

E-mail- [e-mail];[e-mail]

 

 

SPINNERS’ WELFARE

 

 

A few points why Khadi Pratishthan, devoted to the khadi work in Bengal, should continue to give work (in a graduated higher scale of wages) to spinners and find sale for their products in conjunction with self-spinning work:

1. Khadi is never meant to enter into competition with machine- (i.e., mill-) made cloth.

2. Khadi represents ‘back to village’ cry.

3. Village life means simplicity and freedom from contamination of urban ‘civilized and refined’ mode of life, i.e., life represented by cinemas, race-gambling and other nonsensical things.

4. In the mills the workmen get higher wages, but they are converted into so many automata and drudges in the mill area. Half their wages again are consumed in drink and prostitution.

5. The poor women (generally widows) who ply the charkha and earn a bare pittance are thereby enabled to be self-supporting and not dependent on their male relatives who really sit idle and make the helpless women dependent on them work like drudges and galley-slaves. Thus the latter are really freed from sweated labour.

6. Those who ply the charkha are seldom or never whole-time workers; only during the intervals of household duties they utilize their leisure hours. So it would be wrong to compare their off-time labour with that of the sweated labour of the mills.

7. In Bengal there is only one crop (the Aman Paddy) in most parts. That gives peasants occupation for barely three months in the year. Even where there is second crop which gives employment for a couple of extra months or so, for seven months they sit idle. Hence, if the people could be persuaded to ply the charkha, they would have a second occupation or another string to the bow. Thus during a failure of crop due to drought or flood (as is often the case in Bengal at any rate) plying the charkha would be a ‘God-send’. The people won’t starve or be dependent on chance doles distributed in the relief centres.

8. The spinners are not the only people benefited; along with the spinners a large body of weavers fined occupation; in fact, on week days especially during the hat or village market days the weavers in the khadi centres with their woven dhotis and shirting’s eagerly look for payment. Then other subsidiary artisans would be benefited, e.g., the village carpenters, etc., making charkhas.

9. A unique experiment is going on in the Atral and Talora centres (visited by you in 1925). After 12 years of hard labour, expenses, not to speak of the sacrifices of voluntary workers, at last we have got a body of willing ‘self-spinners’. I have myself watched with interest and joy how the women look forward to the saris, bodices, and chadars for children, supplied in exchange for the yarn