G Annapurna sits in the corner of a room with mud walls and floors and a corrugated tin roof, counting cloth bags. Beside her, N Rani works on a sewing machine; her head bent in concentration over the cotton fabric in hand. Nearby, a few others break into cheerful banter from time to time as they check the heaps of cotton fabric before they go under the sewing machine to be made into bags and sent across India, some overseas.
Behind the dry, dusty roads of the village of Paalaguttapalle in Tirupati district of Andhra Pradesh is a tale of grit of Dalit women who rose above drought and poverty to become successful entrepreneurs. Today, the village is known for the Paalaguttapalle bags that have travelled across shores, carrying with them the indomitable spirit of a community of landless agricultural labourers.
Hit by successive droughts between 2010 and 2015, the village saw many of the 60-odd families migrating to other towns in search of alternative sources of livelihood. On an evening in March 2016, four women - G Annapurna, N Rani, K Lakshmikantha and N Anitha - sat discussing at the village temple courtyard, when the idea of setting up an enterprise for making cloth bags came about. With the help of Aparna Krishnan, who moved to the village two decades ago and is a software engineer by profession, the women realised that the best way forward was to utilise the skill they were good at — stitching.
