Sunita Patra, a resident of Ogalpada village of Janla Panchayat lived with her husband and two children in a rented house. Her husband, Kiran Patra was a salesperson, who purchased Patis from the wholesale market & sold them in the shops of the village. Her two sons, studied in Std IX & Std X respectively in Janla School. She was one of the beneficiary of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojna, which gave LPG connection to families, so that they can get rid of cooking through firewood, dung-cakes or even coal, which would reduce health disorder of women. Cooking with LPG gas also helped in reducing the time of cooking. Sunita then decided to utilize that time in a productive way. Through community mobilization, she learnt about tailoring & jute product making training to be given by Mahashakti Foundation with the esteem support of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. & Skill Development Institute, Bhubaneswar. She then discussed with her husband & decided to join the training from 2:00pm to 5:00pm every day.
Sunita was one of the 180 Ujjwala beneficiaries who were selected for the training in the first phase. Because of the family’s financial constraint she wanted to give a helping hand to her husband in earning. But she had no idea & no knowledge on tailoring. She didn’t even know how to operate the sewing machine. But her resolve was very strong. From the very first day of her training, she tried to understand on how to get the job done with a proper finishing. Initially, she was given to alter clothes so as to give the best fit to dresses. Then, with time she learnt graph cutting, cloth cutting, dress stitching & jute products stitching.
After six months of training at the center, Sunita was able to make women top, kurtis, pajamas, salwar-kameezes and even nighties. In jute, she prepared different types of jute bags, mats, wall hangings, etc. After getting proper training, she was able to earn INR 3000/- a month. With her own money, she purchased an automatic sewing machine to take order and earn from her home. During the time of pandemic, she stitched more than 100 face masks a day and sold it, and that was their family’s only source of income during the lockdown.
