In a bid to achieve and go beyond the purpose for which the women self-help groups (SHGs) were originally established in 1989 in a small village in Thally in the erstwhile Dharmapuri district, the Tamil Nadu Women's Development Corporation (TNWDC) has taken the initiative of creating a district-wise database of products manufactured by the SHGs to reach out to the world market.
Sources in TNWDC told The Hindu that the idea was initiated by its managing director Praveen P. Nair . The work on creating the database was awarded to a private event management company based in Chennai six months ago. For this purpose, the Corporation had created a website mathiangandi.com.
The agency had taken up the work right from monitoring the College Bazaars organised by the Project Officers of the Mahalir Thittam in all the districts and collecting feedback from the SHGs and officials across the district about the project before virtually beginning their documentation work.
An official from the event management company said that as many as 11 teams have started the documentation of products in all the districts simultaneously from July 18.
The teams started collecting details of SHGs such as products manufactured, description, rate per piece, wholesale/retail rate and monthly production capacity, places of their present marketing etc.
The products of SHGs were photographed for displaying in the website created by the Corporation.
The database will be uploaded after a thorough verification including competitive price, quality and availability at short notice. The district-specific products with heritage/historical and traditional value would be categorised separately before updating on the website, the official said.
A minimum of 150 to a maximum of 200 products of SHGs from each districts were registered for documentation.
The Corporation is also planning to develop an App for mobile-based marketing. In future it will have marketing tie-up/arrangements with leading online marketing MNCs, an official of the Corporation said.