Rush and reeds industry looks ahead for bright future

Ishara MUDUGAMUWA

Creative bags

Some of the exhibits

Sri Lanka is a country rich with an abundance of handicrafts and arts. Rush and Reeds is a cottage industry with a long history. From ancient times our rural folk used to grow reeds in small area of their paddy field. They use these reeds to make bags and some other necessary products for use in their day-to-day work. At present people engaged in this industry have to face many difficulties due to the scarcity of reeds.

The Committee for Human Rights is a community based organization which is doing a great service for the conservation of rush and reeds in Sri Lanka and protect this industry for the future.

When we started our organization it was very difficult to find people who like to work with us. Finally we could gather a small amount of people after convincing them of the value of the industry and how we could help them work at this industry, Chief Executive Director of the Committee for Human Rights, Piyasoma Bentota said.

Explaining further he said, most of them were complaining about the lack of raw materials. Then we encouraged them to grow reeds in the area. First we selected Kalutara district to undertake this task.

Then we held awareness programs and discussions with the general public. Because of that some people in the area joined us with the positive attitude of the importance of protecting this traditional craft. Then we identified resource persons with proper knowledge about the field.

A large number of schoolchildren and foreign visitors visit Gamagedara. Pics by Indika Prasanga

He also mentioned "They designed products to suit the modern day society and we identified marketable traditional products. We could select about 10 newly designed products and 15 traditional products to be manufactured under the program. Then we realized the necessity of using modified equipment to produce value added products and new hand driven machinery was introduced." We do training program at our head office premises, Gamagedara in Horana.

We did a project in Hambantota to introduce our program and train people to do rush and reeds industry. Currently we train selected youth in Welioya area.

We hope to train people islandwide. We have a good market for rush and reeds products but the problem is that we don't have enough products for the demand of the market.

But after widening our program all around the country we could win that problem also, he added.

He further said "We received National Fair award in 2003 and our organization was recognized by the Equator Initiative, for its outstanding success in reducing poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in 2004.

With lots of effort and hard work we could take our products to the international level.

Our organization was selected as a best practice at the Dubai International Award for Best Practices awarded by the Dubai Municipality and the UN-Habitat in 2004."