Penned by Board Member Alo Pal,
Ezhilarasi is unstoppable.
From the age of 13 to 23, she lived with her older sister in Tirupur to babysit her niece. During that time, she underwent training in tailoring and embroidery and worked and earned a living on a weekly salary basis, often clocking overtime as the pay was double.
At 26, she was married with two children, living in a large joint family. Since she wanted to send her children to a private school, and she already had tailoring skills, she bought a tailoring machine and, for the first five years post-marriage, worked from home. Once her children went to school, she joined a garment export company and again worked overtime, increasing income. Sensing that the company was facing imminent closure, she left it just in time to work in a leather company, maintaining income. But within a year and a half, she started to develop a skin allergy working there.
She left that work to start a clothes business where she bought material in retail and sold them to her clientele on installment. This was during the tough COVID years. She enhanced income by getting material from Tirupur. This effort met the school fee requirements and other basic needs of her children.
In 2021, she joined a self-help group from where she learnt how to make masalas. By this time, suffering from back pain, she had to abandon her tailoring. Masala sales then became her main business. She also started to sell healthy snacks, which she ran out of a government cart on special days at special venues. In 2022, she undertook training at the Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) in making juice concentrates, which she now adds to her stall and makes bulk sales of on special occasions such as flower shows and college fests.
She has now expanded her business to catering for birthday parties and has recently invested in purchasing a popcorn machine. The loan to purchase this machine and other appliances came when the KVK directed her to PIPDIC, where she will have to repay Rs. 65,000/- from a one lakh loan. Her current business plan includes popcorn, idli batter, idli podi, juices, millet and spinach idli and dosa batter, ragi and kambu idli paste on demand, and she is now looking for a space to maintain a regular shop.
She came to know that Sharana was conducting a six-week MSME training (read report here – include hyperlink). After the training, she included rose milk, badam milk, jams, and pickles in her sales business. She now operates Ezhilarasi Food Products with an Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) certification.
Somewhere in this long list, we have to include how she got trained in making foot mats out of waste cloth and, in turn, trained other women in the skill!
But that is not all. While at Sharana, she saw our digital and language lab activities, and she enrolled herself to acquire spoken English competency. This, she says, will help her communicate better with foreign tourists and help them understand her products better.
Today, her older son is in his 3rd year B.Com at Tagore Arts College, and her second son is in his 1st year B.Com. Sharana has been one of many opportunities Ezhilarasi grabbed enthusiastically to upskill and enhance her business. She’s unstoppable and an inspiration worth documenting.
