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| Kondapalli artisans eye the big league |
| B Krishna Mohan / Hyderabad Jan 12, 2010, 00:22 IST |
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Target a turnover of Rs 1 crore in the next financial year
 Artisans who make toys with white sanders wood (a type of soft wood) at Kondapalli, a village about 25 km from Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, are now looking to tap the business opportunity in interior designing.
The artisans recently shifted to making utility items in addition to traditional toys, and mythological and rural motifs. The art is famous for traditional dashavataram (10 incarnations), the Ambari elephant, palanquin-bearers and a farmer couple, among others that depict rural life, deities and animals and birds.
“We have been fairly successful with utility items. We can make new items according to the requirement for a living room or a bedroom,” says U Surya Prakash Rao, an artisan at Kondapalli and also the founder of Kondapalli Artisans’ Mutually-Aided Cooperative Society.
The toy-making village had seen a decline in sales over the years due to a limited product range. But after concerted efforts to synchronise with market requirements, the cluster is now hopeful of touching a turnover of Rs 60 lakh in the current financial year. It has already crossed Rs 55 lakh.
In 2011, it is targeting a turnover of Rs 1 crore on the back of the interior decoration business, Rao said.
The business got a corporate boost in 2002, when Lanco introduced a group insurance scheme for the artisans. The company also organised a design workshop for about 130 artisans in association with the National Institute of Fashion Designing. It hired a Mumbai-based textile designer to help the artisans make utility items like cardholders, pen stands, jewellery boxes and photo frames.
The artisans have now increased the use of natural colours for making toys to make them suitable for export. Lanco initially bought merchandise worth Rs 8 lakh to give an impetus to the marketing efforts.
This apart, the art got patronage from the Malaxmi group, Bharat Biotech and Shantha Biotech.
“We buy corporate gifts from Kondapalli worth Rs 5 lakh in bulk,” said Y Harishchandra Prasad, president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Andhra Pradesh and chairman of the Malaxmi Group. CII has recommended that its members patronise the art.
A common facility centre at Kondapalli for the artisans is being readied for training, knowledge sharing and skill development, creating new designs and better tools for promotion of the art.
Though the toys, costing anything between Rs 10 and Rs 10,000, are usually available with the artisans — who migrated from Rajasthan some 400 years ago — the state-run Lepakshi Emporium, too, sells them.
Kondapalli toys received the geographical indication (GI) status in 2007, the first hand-made toy from the state to be granted such a status. The cluster faced a shortage of Poniki wood for some time, since the area under forests has declined. But now the Kondapalli cluster and the state forest department are planting white sanders on a large scale.
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