Bringing Back The Legacy Of Godhadi To Employ Rural Women

Tushare Pakhare while working with an NGO realised that the rural areas have no sustainable model for anything and this had to change. With a mindset to change the condition, Tushar went back to his village in Karmala, Solapur, to spend some time with his family and come up with an idea to help improve the rural lifestyle. “It was during those days that I saw my grandmother stitching a ‘godhadi’ (quilt), her wrinkled old hands working across the span of her old saris, all put together to create a warm quilt using a simple running stitch. This inspired me to look at the concept of giving a new life to godhadi and I decided to bring it out from the rural setting to the urban environment,” says Tushar Pakhare, an IT professional-turned-entrepreneur, one of the key members of MotherQuilts. The duo taking the concept forward started visiting villages and started the initiative with a handful of old ladies from nearby villages and started taking orders.The duo travelled over six months learning the craft and then created a training module with the help of like-minded and eager-to-learn women. This turned out to be a sustainable model for women and helped decrease unemployment in rural Maharashtra.  Through the initiative, he focused on creating a working revenue model for illiterate women living in villages and for those who couldn’t go out of their houses to pursue jobs because of their cultural and family obligations“I started this initiative for socially, economically and politically backward and marginalised women,” added Tushar.