Sri City gives women a boost

Nellore: Gone are the days when women living in rural areas used to work as farmhands or take up some odd jobs. Today, a majority of women from Tada, Sathyavedu and Sullurpeta mandals in Nellore and Chittoor districts as well as from towns and villages from the adjacent Tamil Nadu are being recruited by industrial units in Sri City Multiproduct Special Economic Zone located in Chittoor District.

Women who used to be hired by farmers to transplant paddy or to remove weeds now have a wide field to choose from. They have been working as security guards, assembling mobile phones and making export-quality dolls, dresses and shoes among many other items. Nearly 50 per cent of the 37,000 people working in industries at Sri City are women, according to a survey conducted last year. Of them, 12,000 have been working at a popular mobile manufacturing unit, Foxconn.

With encouragement from the company managements, the shop floors of some of the food processing units like Kellogs, Everton Tea, Premium Ingredients, Lavazza Coffee, Pepsi, and Cadburys Chocolate are dominated by women from different backgrounds. Units such as Pals Plush, Mondelez, MSR Garments, KGI Clothing, Unicham, Colgate Palmolive, etc have a large women workforce. More opportunities are in the offing with six more food processing units have been gearing up to establish their units at Sri City.

According to a senior official of Sri City, C. Ravindranath, Sri City has been at the pioneering end of harnessing 'women power' on the shop floors across its several manufacturing units. The percentage of female workforce ranges a minimum of 14 to a maximum of 90 in various units in Sri City. Over 90 per cent of the workforce on the shop floor of Raising Star (Foxconn) mobile manufacturing company are women.

"Women make ideal workers because they are disciplined, loyal to the company and less likely to cause trouble or unionise. Women tend to get less bored of their work, and hence they are considered as good at work. They need to be given the opportunity" Mr Ravindranath observed. Manufacturing industries in the sectors of electronics, textile, food processing, toy making, etc started giving increasing preference to women in recruitment mainly because of their dexterity in performing repetitive functions for longer hours is one of the major reasons for hiring women.

Seema Nehra, director at Pals Plush, which makes toys in Sri City for the likes of Universal Studios, Walmart and Pottery Barn Kids, says around 80 per cent of its staff are first time workers and are women. "They are from rural areas. We train them initially. But they are comfortable with the sewing and finishing works of toy making," she says. Globalisation has the power to uproot the traditional treatment towards women to afford them an equal stance in society, Mr Ravindranath said.