At a time when financial crises is one of the major issues affecting many households in Uttarakhand, a local entrepreneur, Kamalpreet Kaur, is providing training and employment opportunities to 500 unskilled and illiterate women of the rural areas in Dehradun district. Kaur, who operates LED lights business along with her husband through her company, Ora Infini, is also a technical partner in the Growth Centre of Thano where she trained over 100 women in making LED light strings under the National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM). She has also provided training in making LED lights to prisoners in Suddhowala jail.
According to Kaur, she consistently attempts to make Uttarakhand a self-sufficient state in the technical business which also helps local women to get employment opportunities besides helping them to build their own small businesses.
“It is still not easy for rural women to start something new like doing a job other than household chores. I have faced so many challenges myself. I am the first woman in the State to enter in the field of electrical lighting business and initially, many people did not take my work seriously as there are very few women in such a field. The situation is clearly more difficult for women of rural areas. Therefore, we mostly include such women and women of Self Help Groups (SHGs) to train who are illiterate and unskilled. We do not simply give them training and leave them to be, we pay them regularly as per their work.”
She further informed that they are currently working with 150 women in a village in Vikasnagar area and soon they will be giving training sessions in Sahaspur and Kalsi. By October 15, about 500 women will be trained in producing LED light strings, stated Kaur. She also added that for Diwali, they have set the target to produce 20,000 LED string lights.
“These lights will be better than the Chinese light strings as these are waterproof and have long shelf life. Even the LED used in these strings is not from China like most of the bulbs used in the light strings available in the market. We use LEDs imported from Malaysia because we are serious about boycotting Chinese products in our business and the quality of Malaysian lights is better too,” stated Kaur. She further added that her company is currently working on the production of LED light strings with UV rays technology which is also used in water purifiers, making it effective to kill germs to some extent if the light falls on any surface or person. Since the production cost of such light strings is more, only 200 of them will be produced for now, as per Kaur.
Moreover, she also revealed that she is planning to approach the State Government to make LED street lights for several areas of the district besides the lighting system during Kumbh Mela the next year. “Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat had talked about the installation of LED street lights in rural areas. We think that it will be commendable if the work on those lights would be done by workers of Uttarakhand in order to promote local businesses. Besides, we will also try to approach the government about the lighting system for Kumbh Mela stating that instead of approaching an outside company for this task, local entrepreneurs should get the opportunity to do this with the help of rural women and spread the message of being ‘vocal for local’,” Kaur said.