India’s ‘pencil village’ counts the cost of Covid school closures | Global development

School closures in India through the pandemic have left their mark on greater than the kids who’ve seen delays to their studying. In a single Kashmiri village the influence has been catastrophic on employment.

Choose up a pencil anyplace throughout India and it’s prone to come from the poplar bushes of Ukhoo.

This village, with an abundance of bushes, about 10 miles south of Srinagar metropolis in Kashmir’s Pulwama district, provides greater than 90% of the wooden utilized by India’s pencil producers, which export to greater than 150 international locations.

Earlier than Covid, greater than 2,500 folks labored within the village’s 17 pencil factories and the business supported about 250 households.

However, after almost two years of faculty closures and a dramatic drop in demand for the village’s merchandise, manufacturing unit homeowners lowered their workforce by greater than half.

Staff have been dismissed with out pay, whereas lots of those that saved their jobs had migrated from different components of India, and have been cheaper to make use of. Now the village and its workforce are ready eagerly for the market to revive.

Rajesh Kumar, 26, from Bihar, has labored in Ukhoo for seven years. Like different migrant employees, he lives in a room on the manufacturing unit premises and works 10- to 12-hour shifts. Throughout lockdown final 12 months, the manufacturing unit proprietor offered meals and lodging when manufacturing shutdown for about three months. He is without doubt one of the luckier ones to be again working now.

“I hope the pencil demand will increase and these factories are stuffed with employees once more, as lots of our associates and other people from our villages discover work [here] and are capable of make a dwelling,” says Kumar.

Farooq Ahmed Wani, 27, from the town of Jammu, has labored as a machine operator in Ukhoo for the previous 5 years.

“We hope that colleges reopen all through the nation so that there’s extra demand for pencils available in the market,” he says in an optimistic tone. “Then these factories can make use of extra younger folks and extra migrants may also get some work right here.”

Pencil wala Gaon, or “pencil village”, attracted the eye of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. In his month-to-month radio programme, Mann Ki Baat, final 12 months he stated the district was an instance of how one can scale back the nation’s dependency on imports. “As soon as upon a time we used to import wooden for pencils from overseas however now our Pulwama is making the nation self-sufficient within the subject of pencil making,” Modi stated.

A latest ministry of house affairs report stated that the village could be developed as a “particular zone” for manufacturing. “Now the entire nation could be equipped completed pencils, manufactured utterly in Pulwama,” the report famous. However the pandemic has proven how overreliance on one product in a area brings its personal issues.

Abrar Ahmed, a unit supervisor at considered one of Ukhoo’s factories, says everybody has suffered. “Even the sawdust from woodcutting machines is normally taken by the native villagers who then promote it to poultry farms and for different functions within the village.”