| Case Stories |
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Quest for economic empowerment: The story of Harka Bahadur Sarki
Harka Bahadur Sarki has gone through a lot of struggle in his life. Despite having been endowed with basic skills in his traditional occupation as a shoemaker, Harka Bahadur was finding it extremely diffocult in getting his ends meet.
After having started out by setting up an open-air shoe repair outlet in Nepalgunj, Harka realized that he could not continue with the very small enterprise, as income generated was too meager to sustain his livelihood. The quest for sustainable livelihood brought Harka to Birendranagar, Surkhet where competition would be less fierce. By coming over to Birendranagar, he could also see that there were very few poorly organized shoe repair and production outlets. He immediately realized that Birendranagar was by and large unexploited market for locally manufactured shoes. This prompted harka to rent out a room and start manufacturing shoes. In the meantime he also attended a training programme for shoemakers. This also helped a lot in boosting up his morale.
But the high morale and motivation was not be long lasting. Despite the presence of a promishing market the hardships of Harka were far from being over. Due to lack of working capital the small enterprise that Harka created seemed to be heading towards bankruptcy portending the onset of gloomy days for Harka. Then things changed. After having come into contact with one of the community mobilizers of RUP-Programme, Harka became sensitized about RUPP activities and began taking active participation in Tole/Lane level discussions. After being organized into a group of like-minded collegues from the same caste, harka went ahead and registered a shoe making enterprise with the municipality.
With their dedication the enterprise successfully completed its maturity period. This qualified the enterprise for RUPP support. After several sessions with the community mobilizer assessing the actual needs and requirements, the enterprise group led by Harka formally applied for credit support. After due deliberations over the case in hand, the Partnership Development Committee sanctioned Rs. 25,000 towards credit support for the enterprise. This was in a way a new lease of life for Harka and his collegues. As they had all requisite skills to cater to the local market, availability of credit support of Rs. 25,000 provided them with significant resource leverage. They lost no time in revamping their operations by procuring additional stock of raw materials and investing in tools that offered productivity advantage. Thanks to training and credit support received from RUPP, their enterprise Jyoti Shoe Industry is a thriving business now. They have managed to increase their production from 700 to 1440 pairs of shoes in addition to manufacturing 500 pairs of slippers per year. The shoes produced by Jyoti Shoe Industry are sold as far as Kalilot apart from urban hinterland areas. The raw materials for the shoes are procured locally from hinterland areas. This has helped their counterparts from poorer section of urban and rural hinterland areas who are in the occupation of collecting raw hide. The group has fully paid back its loan and sustaining its activities from its own resources.
All Harka is thinking about these days is growth - thanks to additional insights that they gained after attending enterprise management training programme conducted by RUPP.
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