This temple town in Prakasam district, famous for Chennakesava Swamy temple, is also the home for once flourishing slate industry meeting the demands for the writing medium within the country and abroad.
However, the demand for wooden-framed slates has slowly come down with paper replacing the brittle slates as the most-preferred medium of writing by tiny tots at the time of their initiation into the world of letters.
While most domestic players have adopted to change and switched to making export-quality unbreakable slates from imported hard board material, select entrepreneurs continue to make the conventional slates to meet the demand from overseas and domestic customers.
Thin margins
“Despite thin margins, I make conventional slates with wooden frames not to disappoint long-standing customers from within and outside the country,” says Chakka Malakonda Narasimha Rao of B.S. Sipani and Co, which still produces the writing medium getting orders through stationery firms from Kolkata and other places on a regular basis.
“On specific orders from buyers in states like Bihar and West Bengal, I make these slates for school-going children,” he reveals taking time in between his busy schedule of supervising the 100-odd workers, most of them women, processing the slates mined from in and around Markapur to produce ready-to-use slates with wooden or tin or plastic frames.
Even now there is demand for conventional school slates with wooden frames especially from Bangladesh as well as West Bengal and Bihar in the country, says his brother Chinna Narasimha Rao who has been producing this writing medium for over three decades. Meanwhile, other domestic players have re-positioned themselves to make durable slates with hardboards imported from abroad to meet the increasing demand ahead of the beginning of the new academic year. “We source hardboards from, among other countries, Malaysia and Hong Kong and process them with plastic or tin frames and sell them to wholesale stationery shops across the country,” says Markapur Slate Manufacturers’ Association president B. Pulla Rao.
As an environment-friendly measure, the government should make it compulsory for primary school students to use slates.
G. Ramana
Secretary of Markapur Slate Manufacturers’ Association
