Towards a Nex-Gen Cottage Industry in the Digital Age: Insights from an Action Research with Rural Artisans in India

Despite the recognition of the significance of the crafts industry for inclusive development, its informal, disaggregated and disenfranchised nature poses several problems for the rural artisans, who are often forced to live in poverty. Extant approaches to address the industry’s problems have involved siloed attempts, wherein interventions were appropriated to resolve issues within parts of the supply chain, resulting in persistence of the issues. Using Self-Help- Group women in rural India as a case in point, the paper adopts a discovery orientation and action research alignment to evolve the design principles of an ICT driven peer-to-peer collaborative, decentralized supply chain model known as Nex-Gen Cottage Industry as a means to organise the industry. The results of a pre-pilot study in a village Kandi have been discussed along with the implications of this research for academia and the society