This temple town in Prakasam district is famous for Chennakesava Swamy temple, but is also home to the stone writing slate industry, which has been fading in recent times. Now, it meets existing domestic and international demand for the once-common school accessory.
Wooden-framed slates have slowly gone out of fashion, with paper replacing the brittle black stone slabs.
While most domestic players have adapted to change and switched to making export-quality unbreakable slates from imported hard board, some entrepreneurs continue to make conventional slates to meet residual demand.
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“Despite thin margins, I make conventional slates with wooden frames to avoid disappointing long-standing customers within and outside the country,” says Chakka Malakonda Narasimha Rao of B.S. Sipani and Co, which still gets orders through stationery firms from Kolkata and some other places.
“On specific orders from buyers in Bihar and West Bengal, I make the slates for school-going children,” he says. There are about 100 workers, in the unit, most of them women, processing the slate mined from in and around Markapur to make the ready-to-use slabs that have wooden, metal or plastic frames.
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Even now there is demand for conventional slates with wooden frames from Bangladesh, besides West Bengal and Bihar, says his brother Chinna Narasimha Rao, who has been making them for over three decades.
Meanwhile, other domestic players have repositioned themselves to make durable slates with imported hardboard to meet the annual spike in demand for the new academic year.
“We source hardboard from Malaysia and Hong Kong and process them with plastic or tin frames and sell them to wholesale stationers,” says Markapur Slate Manufacturers’ Association president B. Pulla Rao.
As an environment-friendly measure, Union and State governments should make it compulsory for primary school students to use slates instead of paper produced by felling trees. This will nurture the labour-intensive industry, says association secretary G. Ramana.
No tax should be imposed on slates across the country to promote the writing medium, adds M. Shankar of Sivaji Slate Works.