Tasar, the other name of hope

The Jharkhand State has a combination of a variety of tribes and occupational artisan castes. The livelihood
systems in the area are primarily dependent on combinations of agriculture, forests and labouring. Due to
very small holding and the very low productivity of the land most households eke out a living by
maintaining a diversified pattern of occupations; no single activity provides sufficient resources to entirely
ensure their livelihood. Women’s work is critical for the survival of tribal households both in terms of
provisioning food and income as well as in the management of resources. Agriculture in the tribal
villages/area is predominantly rain fed and mono-cropped.

Rainfed agriculture has traditionally been the main livelihood activity for poor families in Dhanbad Forest
Division, as the rest part of the mother state it is supplemented in varying degrees by dependence on forests,
small livestock rearing, handicrafts, wages, and hunting and gathering. Improving productivity of
agriculture is essential to enhance rural livelihoods but agriculture has inherent limits as a livelihood option
for landless families. Thus, besides increasing agricultural productivity, the challenge is to develop
livelihood opportunities based on other occupations that supplement agricultural income, offset its
uncertainty and exploit the growing demand for niche products, especially in urban centres. It is in this
context that Tasar Sericulture becomes important since it has the potential to provide a stable income for the
rural, especially tribal poor communities.

As a part of their rural livelihood option, the villagers of Dhanbad are practicing Tasar cultivation since a
long time. But due to absence of proper knowledge on cultivation and marketing it became near to extinct.
Though the favorable climate and natural vegetation of Dhanbad Forest division is good for cultivation of
Tasar, but little anthropogenic potentiality collapsed all the ways and opportunities. But then there was a
turn around. An energetic and optimist Forest Officer named Mr. Sanjeev Kumar IFS, DFO Dhanbad took
the charge of this forest division. Being a forest conservator he empathically felt the need for creating rural
livelihood options in order to protect forest from exploitation. Instead of introducing new things he decided
to promote those practices in which the communities had some wisdom and had been practiced in that area
earlier. At first Forest D

Jharkhand Udyog Bivag promotes various small scale industries by engaging rural communities as a stake
holder. In 2008-09 Udyog Bivag with the collaboration of Dhanbad Forest Department initiated an
integrated approach to Tasar production. Here Forest Department played the key role by providing space to
build training centre and production unit. Udyog Bibhag installed equipments for spinning and weaving and
also gave them training to prepare them skilled labour. Till December 2010 sixty women have gone through
six month’s training in a group of twenty each where they got Rs. 75/day as stipend. Previously all of these
women were engaged merely in household chores taking absolutely no part in family earning. Forest
department is also promoting Tasar cocoon cultivation as a part of forward backward linkage by providing
necessary training to village people. The major parts of them were unskilled labors, earlier that were
bounded to migrate to other parts of the state as mining labor. Now they formed groups of 23 farmers each
and are cultivating Tasar cocoon. Jharcraft (an enterprise of Jharkhand Udyog Bivag) is a sole buyer of the
cocoon, who will purchase cocoon and supply it to spinners (all of the spinners are women). Spinners will
extract the silk yarn from the cocoon and supply it back to jharcraft again. Now it will be go to weavers (all
of them are male, earlier who are unskilled mining labors), this weavers are trained by Jharcraft and also got
Handloom machine from them. They will now make sarees and other garments. Jharcraft now collect those
end products from community and will market them through their emporium across the country and various
national and international trades fair. After selling of the products Jharcraft will also return a share from
profit back to the community.
During interview with different age groups of people we came to know that their income from this
supplementary livelihood now going to exceed their conventional income from agriculture.