Hell for Leather ; Old Agra's Once-Famed Footwear Makers Seem to Be Caught in a Time Warp From Which They Are Finding It Difficult to Escape.

Summary

---

In a nondescript lane of Jagdishpura in the old quarters of Agra, Ankur Bansal, 26, sits in his poky, top-floor home-cum-workshop, wearing a vest and wrapped at the waist in a towel, supervising a team of seven kaarigars or workers making sneakers with their hands and tools. Once the ordered pairs are made, they are given finishing touches in an adjacent room, labelled, put in boxes and dispatched to Hing Ki Mandi, the local wholesale market for footwear.

In the nearby Khataina neighbourhood of Loha Mandi, 29-year-old Mohammad Balo's small house doubles up as his kaarkhana or workshop; of the handful of kaarigars he employs to make ladies' sandals, many are his relatives. They make 48 pairs a day.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

Hell for Leather ; Old Agra's Once-Famed Footwear Makers Seem to Be Caught in a Time Warp From Which They Are Finding It Difficult to Escape.

Business is brisk, but that's because the season has just started for Bansal and Balo and thousands of others like them in the two- kilometre stretch between Jagdishpura and Loha Mandi and elsewhere in the city famed for its leather industry. But the season will soon be over. "In the last 10 years, we have regular work only during the 3-4 months of the festival season (September-December). The rest of t...

See the full content of this document

---