Elephants motifs in gamosa reflect community’s inclination to coexist

GUWAHATI: Facilitating human-wildlife coexistence is not possible unless there is sincere community support for the initiative. So, winning the support of the community is an essential prerequisite to achieve the goal. Frequent interfaces between villagers and wild elephants whose habitats have shrunk, migration corridors have been fragmented, in eastern Assam districts calls for community-oriented mitigation measures that may help coexistence with wild elephants.

In the greater interest of facilitating human elephant coexistence (HEC) with community support in eastern Assam districts, premier biodiversity conservation organisation Aaranyak has launched an initiative to provide high-quality yarn as well as training to women handloom weavers from the community.

The Aaranyak in collaboration with British Asian Trust and with support from Darwin Initiative has so far provided high-quality yarn to weavers from over 200 households in eastern Assam districts of Jorhat (40 households), Sivasagar (43), Majuli (60), Dibrugarh (48) and Tinsukia (12) so as to supplement the average household income.

In tune with its endeavour to facilitate conservation of elephants, Aaranyak has encouraged some of these weavers to weave gamosas with elephant motifs to highlight the importance of the giant animal in our ecosystem, folklore.

Ensuring a steady supply of yarn, Aaranyak aims to contribute to the sustainable livelihoods of these handloom weavers, enabling them to earn a decent income as well as preserve the traditional craft of handloom weaving in eastern Assam districts especially river island district of Majuli which is renowned for rich traditional handloom products weaved by tribal weavers.

In pursuit to add value to the handloom products in those human-elephant interface affected areas in Eastern Assam, Aaranyak had adopted a two-pronged strategy of providing high-quality yarn to women handloom weavers as well as advanced trading to upscale their skill.

Sixty-five weavers from Jorhat district, 68 from Sivasagar district, 71 from Majuli district, 65 from Dibrugarh district and 11 from Tinsukia district have been provided training till date to help them improve the quality of their products.

Each of these weavers were provided with 5 kgs of high-quality yarn each. The average monthly income of the households where these weavers belong, is around Rs 5000. Training was provided for 11 days in total to weavers across these five districts. The master trainer engaged by Aaranyak was Nandeswar Deka.

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