Weaving their livelihoods with reed

Basket weavers of Idinjar face dwindling raw material and falling prices

Fifty-five-year old Baby, who weaves baskets and mats out of reed for a living, has four cases against him for trespassing the forests at Palode.

In all four instances, he was booked for using a vehicle to transport reed branches out of the forests, instead of carrying them out as headload, for which he had been allotted a pass by the Palode Forest Range Office.

Baby calls this unreasonable, given that the reeds are located deep into the forests, from where carrying branches manually is a rather tiring task. Since the Forest Department does not make room for this concern, he now depends on the Kerala State Bamboo Corporation (KSBC)’s depot at Idinjar

for raw material.

Forty years

Baby belongs to one among the 45 families that settled in the Adiyodi colony at Idinjar, near Palode, around forty years ago. With all of them being traditional basket-weavers, the colony, located close to the forests, was an ideal location.

Back then, reed was abundant at Palode, says Lalitha, 64, who moved to the colony from Nedumangad. Over the past few decades, however, plantations of non-native species such as eucalyptus and Acacia mangium have taken over most of the forest land.

The going rate for a bunch of reed branches at the KSBC depot is ₹55, according to Baby. These are brought down from the forests at Pooyamkutti and near the Idamalayar dam in Idukki.

The branches are washed, dried, and chopped into thin strips by the men, and the women weave the strips into products. With four such bunches, Baby’s family weaves around 10 mats a week, which are then sold to the depot for making plywood.

With the KSBC offering around ₹68 per mat, the family of seven adults and three children earns just a little over ₹400 a week.

It is to supplement this income that Baby and his neighbours head to the forests.

With the reed picked from there, they weave baskets, sieves, and mats, which are purchased by city-based traders. While the baskets are sold by the weavers for ₹150 each, the retailers charge around ₹400 to ₹500 for them.

Moving away

“If things remain this way, the trade will end with our generation,” says Lalitha. Most of the young residents of the colony have turned to daily-wage work for livelihood.

Yet, Lalitha and her friends keep weaving, hoping that the craft they grew up with would see them to the end.