How Aarti Rana’s initiative transformed the lives of 10,000 tribal women in UP

There was a time about three decades ago, when a Tharu woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakhimpur Kheri district would’ve spent her entire lifetime not getting a glimpse of the world outside her village. She would be married off by 11 or 12, and spend the rest of her life in the kitchen or the fields, raising many children and caring for the elders in the house until she hit her own silver years.

Today, however, a Tharu woman in Lakhimpuri Kheri is a matriarch of a new world. Thanks to the vision of handloom weaver and social entrepreneur Aarti Rana, 10,000 Tharu women in 350 self-help groups helm a self-sustaining rural economy of handlooms and traditional crafts today. 

Rana grew up the same way the other girls of this indigenous ethnic group did. Married by 18, and a mother by 20. But in the early years of her marriage, she discovered a National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM) skilling programme that changed not just the course of her life but that of every woman in her panchayat.

The Tharu tribal community resides primarily in the Terai region of Nepal and the adjoining foothill areas of northern India, including Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Bihar. While the agrarian community - much like other tribal communities in the country - preserved a strong natural medicinal tradition (known particularly for its resistance to malaria), their traditional practices were invalidated by a combination of displacement from their lands, colonialism, casteism, and modern medical hegemony.

Rana started stitching ghaghra-cholis as a child with her mother, and in 2015, when the NRLM programme came to her village, she was among the five women out of 25 people who enrolled in it, despite pushback from her in-laws. 

“That was the first time I traveled outside my village to Sitapur. I felt like a student, I was away from home, from my obligations, learning something new,” says Rana. “We learnt how to work on the loom and made dharis (woven mats). We could even stitch roofs above our heads with sugarcane leaves. 

“Just knowing the utility value behind these easily available materials made me feel very capable. Back home the only other thing I knew was to collect firewood from the forest and fish.”

After the programme’s initial success, the District Magistrate encouraged the women to form self-help groups in their own villages and train others in handloom work.

Rana took the lead. She began travelling across her panchayat, reaching out to women and persuading their families to let them participate.

“No family was comfortable with the idea of their women working outside,” says Rana. “Just like they weren’t comfortable sending them to school. But they saw that the cattle they were rearing died during extreme weather conditions, and the harvest wasn’t always conducive. We, on the other hand, had something to show—the sales we made during our training. This could be a perennial source of income And honestly, every family could use an extra source of income.”

Out of the 25 people who had gone for the initial training, Rana was the only one to build on it. She took the looms that the others had got, which were not being put to use, and started training the women.

“In one month, we had formed 350 self-help groups across 44 villages,” says Rana. “In the beginning, we had to travel to Sitapur every time we needed raw materials, which wasn’t sustainable. So we started asking people to donate old, unused textiles from their homes. We upcycled those into new dharis.

With support from organisations like the Integrated Tribal Development Project (ITDP) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Rana expanded her efforts. During the Covid-19 lockdown, the women made baskets and pen stands using moonji grass (a tall, sturdy grass commonly found in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana), which, along with their handlooms, became popular at Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India’s government exhibitions.

Even for these initiatives, Rana points out, they often have to travel to other towns to procure moonji grass—despite it growing abundantly in the forests surrounding their own villages. “It’s right there, but we’re not allowed to use it,” she says. This restriction isn’t just an inconvenience; it reflects a deeper, long-standing problem. Like many forest-dwelling tribal communities, the Tharus have lived on this land for generations, yet they lack formal rights to access or manage its natural resources. What should be a sustainable, locally sourced livelihood becomes a logistical and economic burden—rooted in policies that continue to alienate Adivasi communities.

But despite these challenges, Tharu Hath Karga Gharelu Udyog, the self-help group that focuses on handloom weaving and handicrafts; and Gautam Self-Employment group under NRLM, which engages women in producing items such as carpets, baskets, and bags - both run by Rana - have become resounding success stories.

Sunita Rana, a single mother of two boys, who is a part of these self-help groups has made enough money to send her older son to a private college in Delhi. “Before this, I used to work on the farm, we never had enough to run the house and my father-in-law controlled all the finances at home. No, I make Rs 10,000-12,000 a month and give him a share of this income.

“I have the choice to use the rest the way I want,” says Sunita.

Rana’s efforts in promoting self-reliance among tribal women through traditional crafts earned her the Rani Laxmi Bai Bravery Award by the Government of Uttar Pradesh in 2016 and Nari Shakti Puraskar, India's highest civilian award for women, for 2020. 

“We often speak of progress in the 21st century, but for many indigenous communities, the ground reality tells a different story. Discrimination still follows us when we step out to work. Exploitation is common when we work under others.

That’s why our self-help groups matter so much. They allow our women to earn a living from within the safety and dignity of their own homes. There, they’re free from judgment, free from daily microaggressions. They get to decide how much to work, when to work—and most importantly, they’re in charge of their own future."