With time at a premium everyone is looking at convenience right from ready-to-eat food to readymade garments to instant fixes for everything. Repairs and alterations have become a forgotten task and there is no place at home for items like a sewing machine.
Addressing the felt need for simple tasks like repairs and alterations there are tailors who go around colonies wheeling their sewing machines mounted on a hand cart to the doorstep of the customer.
“There are some 30 families who have been earning a livelihood by doing simple tailoring work at the doorstep of the customer,” says Raju, a tailor who migrated to the city more than a decade ago. He is from Kallepalli in Srikakulam district and most others are from in and around Rajam, he says.
“On an average I make Rs. 300 per day. It is not that everyday we get customers. There are days when we don’t get anything at all,” says Raju. With the earning he has been able to feed his family of four. His two children go to a good school, thanks to a Good Samaritan who pays part of the fee.
His pedal-driven sewing machine is mounted on a steel wireframe with two cycle wheels that enable him to push it like a hand cart. He carries seat and other tools of the craft on the cart. Parking himself under the shade of a tree or inside the parking lot of an apartment he gets work like alterations of clothes, stitching up of curtains and some basic repairs. Sometimes he goes wherever a customer calls him up and asks him to come down.
“Since we have to push the cart, we cannot go too far in the city,” says Raju.
There are some 30 families who have been earning a livelihood by doing simple tailoring work on the doorstep of the customer
Raju
A tailor
