A PAPER FACTORY FOR GUYANA
South-South Co-operation

Cheddi Jagan, President of the Co-operative Republic of Guayan inspected the paper appreciatively.  “What can it be used for?” he asked, feeling the unusual texture of the samples that were presented to him.

“To write love letters...paint pictures......wrap gifts....”, said Ashok Khosla.
The President looked up from the samples and regarded Ashok wryly.
“Well, maybe you could write your biography on it?”, tried Ashok.

It is hard to know what passed through the President’s mind.  Those long years, fighting for self-rule from the British.  The denial of opportunity to lead Guyana to independence because of their yielding to pressure from the Americans, who suspected him of communist sympathies.  The quarter of a century of exile, while Burnham, once his friend and partner, burnt himself out.  The possibility of finding ways to revive the heavily indebted economy of his small nation with its courageous people.

The opportunity of writing his biography on TARA paper was perhaps not what swayed the President.  Most probably it was the quality of the product which made him order a paper unit for his country.  Development Alternatives will set it up in this South American country which has a large number of Indians since their forefathers were shipped to it by the British as indentured labourers to work the sugar plantations.

The President was at the TNK unit to have a look at the alternative technologies that Development Alternatives has been promoting through TARA.  He watched with interest the various stage the hand-made, re-cycled paper had to go through: cleaning, sizing, starching, squeezing (the water out of it).

At the machine that manufactures microlite tiles, someone from the Guyana contingent raised the issue of whether these would be too heavy; he stated Guyanese use zinc as roof cover, with wood as infrastructure.

Zincroofs, I wondered : did Guyana have a surplus of zinc (as in mines).  Rereading the masterpiece Shanti, by the Guyanese writer Arnold Harrichand Itwaru -- who lives in Canada like our own novelists Sarosh Cowasji and Rohington Mistry -- I spotted it: “The wind sobbed through the eaves and windows of the zinc-roofed school building, sighed in the blackboards’ chalk - written empty vigil over darkening empty benches and desks”.

Itwaru is here referring to the school he went to in a novel which makes a political statement.  As the blurb on the jacket cover notes “Itwaru’s handling of the tensions between Afro- Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese is impressive, however much we might like to see people of colour united against the white oppressor.”

Zinc roofs are not restricted to Guyana.  In another novel  A Candle or The Sun, Gopal Baratham, who like Itwaru has Indian parentage, talks of a house in Singapore “with a rough cement floor and a roof of corrugated-zinc sheets”.

“MCR tiles are strong, durable and inexpensive”, said Ashok.  So strong, that they are one of the few roofing materials that can survive the winds of a typhoon.  “But you should avoid having monkeys throw coconut on them,” he added, especially big ones.

At the documentation section, the President pointed to the Development Alternatives newsletter and remarked that he read it regularly.  At that stage he did not know that his comments on one of the editorials had been published in the letters section.  He ordered a complete set of the DA building manuals.

The TARA loom, and the fabrics manufactured by it, took a lot of the visitors’ time.  They had a number of queries that were answered by the staff: the materials that the TARA loom used included wool, silk and cotton; of course the loom had to be suitably modified; the cotton that they noticed as a floor covering could also be used for stitching clothes; some designs were exclusively TARA’s creations.  The economics of the loom were no doubt “terrific”, its productivity was so high that the “pay-back period was less than a year”.  It cost was approximately Rs. 10,000.

At that price it has been exported to several countries.  Ashok remarked with a dead pan expression “The customs officials would not believe that the cloth produced by the TARA machines was, in fact, handloom, and we had to introduce some defects to convince them.”

The President nodded.  There was no need to convince him.  He saw what he saw.  But the harsh fact was that the loom could be put to use only if the people had been trained to do so.  “You have to first develop our people’s skills“ he observed.

The ambition of the Development Alternatives is that the textiles of the loom (if not the loom), should penetrate not only the market in Georgetown, but Georgetown, Washington D.C.

That was possibility Cheddi Jagan did not come to dispute and with a gentle smile and a wave to all those who had made his TNK visit a memorable one, he and his entourage drove away with the outriders setting the pace.

- Gudakesh

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