DRAP is a social enterprise owned by rural women producers and supervised by textile professionals. The organization envisions enabling underprivileged women community and craft clusters by providing sustainable employment opportunities in traditional textiles. DRAP’s mission is to impact livelihood of 5000 marginalized women by 2020. In coming years, DRAP will become a self-sustainable producer company and global brand name for authentic handmade fabrics and apparels catering to mass market.

Detailed Information: In 2010-11, Drishtee had trained around 5000 marginalized rural women of Bihar in manual textile techniques of spinning, weaving and stitching under SGSY scheme of Government of India. The core focus was to provide rural population with a skill-set for local income generation opportunities. Later, it turned out to be a challenge as how to link this skilled workforce to mainstream market.

In March 2012, Drishtee helped 110 women in Bhagalpur and Munger districts of Bihar to form a producer company. It was named as “Drishtee Rural Apparel Producer Organization” and branded as DRAP. Operation model of DRAP comprises of “hub and spokes” arrangement. The intention is to establish an internal value chain of hand-spinning, handloom weaving, manual stitching and handcrafted value addition processes. This rural manufacturing is backed by a team of dedicated professionals using state of the art methods to reach out to global market.

Since 2012, 600 women from Bhagalpur and Munger (Bihar) were trained by DRAP in advanced manual stitching, basic spinning and preparatory weaving skills. In three years duration, 360 women have become skilled producers and are earning sustainable livelihood. 90 women are engaged in hand spinning of cotton yarns, 120 women are helping weavers to produce handwoven fabrics and 105 women are engaged in stitching apparels. Under the umbrella of DRAP, all these clusters are interconnected as links of a systematic value chain. Along with earning livelihoods from DRAP, women are establishing their identity in the community and seeking new horizons of self-reliance while marking a positive impact on our society.

With regular practice and dedication, the women have been able to produce market acceptable products which are getting sold on leading e-commerce platforms. DRAP is becoming a brand for quality and price sensitive market and can be found on Jabong, Jabongworld, Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, PayTm and Shopclues.