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AN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.
An Appeal for Funds. Miss B. M. Tweddle writes :-In the village of Ikkadu which is two miles from Tiruvallur and thirty miles from Madras there is an Industrial School in connection with the Wesleyan Mission. In this school are people from different communities and they associate in friendly contact with each other. There are Brahmins, Mahomedans, Christians and Adi-Dravidas a hundred and twenty in all. Day by day old prejudices are being broken down and communal feeling which is such a danger in India is being removed. There are high school girls who are up for industrial training but the bulk of the people are unspeakably poor. There are men, women, boys and girls of all ages. Day by day an attempt is being made to solve in a very small corner one of India's greatest problems, that of poverty and in attempting that, people of all classes are learning to work happily together.
It is hardly necsssary to mention the difficulties of the village people in India. In the Chingleput District in which Ikkadu is situated the people are able to work on the land for about seven months in the year. During that period their standard of life may be described as on a subsistence level, during the remaining five months it sinks to a starvation level. These conditions of poverty are aggravated when the monsoon fails.
It was in an endeavour to ameliorate these conditions that a Lace School was opened in Ikkadu over thirty years ago. The lace work, however, is now carried on under many difficulties not the least of which is that the finished products require a foreign market which is fluctuating and uncertain. The necessary raw material must be imported and duty paid on them. These conditions limit the scope of its operation and makes it almost impossible during the present years. In years gone by the money earned by lace-making has very often saved whole families from untold poverty, but what with the duty on the raw material imported into this country for lace-making and the duty on the finished article when imported into other countries the work is becoming almost impossible to
organise. Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
