Junagadh and Bhavnagar Livelihoods & Empowerment
A wedding business built by a leprosy colony
Ten people from the Junagadh and Bhavnagar leprosy colonies were trained in a trade. Five years later the mandap business they built held ₹13 lakh in assets and fed seven families — and, more to the point, the town had to do business with them.
Leprosy is curable, and has been for decades. What is not curable by medicine is the exclusion that follows a diagnosis, which outlives the disease by a generation and lands hardest on children who never had it.
Families in India’s leprosy colonies are not primarily short of treatment. They are short of an economic reason for the rest of the town to interact with them.
The programme
Between 2013 and 2018, SSKK worked with the Sasakawa India Leprosy Foundation on livelihoods for leprosy-affected families in the Junagadh and Bhavnagar colonies. The objective was narrow on purpose: not welfare, but a trade with local demand.
- Five young men from the Junagadh colony were trained in shamiyana and mandap decoration — the tent, staging and decor work every wedding, religious function and public meeting in Gujarat requires.
- Five women from the Bhavnagar colony were trained in sewing and the ready-made garment trade.
Both trades were chosen for the same reason. Demand is local, constant and does not depend on anyone’s goodwill.
What happened
The mandap business grew from roughly ₹4 lakh to ₹7 lakh in turnover. The Junagadh colony secured a ₹2.05 lakh government loan to establish the service properly — access to formal credit being, in itself, a form of recognition these families had not previously had.
Over the period the business built up ₹13 lakh in assets and supported seven families.
SSKK’s role after the initial training was continuous: mentoring, motivation, help with the loan paperwork, and being present through the first bad months. Skills training that ends at the certificate almost always fails at exactly that point.
The part that was not in the log frame
The families’ own account of what changed is not about the money.
A mandap service is booked by strangers. Someone getting married in Junagadh needs a tent, calls the business with the best rate, and a transaction takes place between people who — under any other circumstance — would have kept their distance.
The community’s description of the outcome was that society accepted them. It did not happen through a campaign about stigma. It happened because they became a supplier that the town needed.
Why we still tell this story
The programme closed in 2018. We keep it on the website because it is the clearest example we have of a principle that runs through all of our livelihoods work: dignity is a by-product of economic necessity, not of sympathy.
Give a marginalised group something the market actually wants, and the market will do work that no awareness programme can.