KARACHI: The 18th edition of ‘Sartyoon Sang’, a three-day exhibition of handicrafts made by rural Sindhi women, concluded on Sunday at Ocean Mall in Clifton after drawing a steady stream of visitors over the weekend.
Stalls carried home textiles, baskets, jewellery, dresses, dupattas and shawls, embellished with traditional embroidery and cutwork. The range also included stitched and unstitched cloth, needlework in several embroidery styles, straw work, bed sheets, crochet and machine embroidery. More than a dozen stalls were set up in all.
Women artisans travelled from 15 districts — Badin, Ghotki, Jacobabad, Kashmore-Kandhkot, Khairpur, Larkana, Matiari, Mirpurkhas, Noshehro Feroz, Qambar Shahdadkot, Sanghar, Shikarpur, Sukkur, Thatta and Umerkot — to showcase their products.
The event was organised by the Sindh Rural Support Organisation (SRSO) with the support of the Sindh government, with the stated aim of building market links for rural women and artisans.
SRSO Chief Executive Officer Muhammad Dital Kalhoro said the objective was to secure better income for women artisans of rural Sindh. He said the organisation has established Business Development Groups (BDGs) across its operational districts and has trained more than 15,000 women members in craft skills.
Spokesperson to the Sindh government and MPA Sadia Javed jointly inaugurated the three-day event with Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) Chairperson Senator Rubina Khalid. Both lauded SRSO’s efforts and expressed hope that the exhibition would help artisans build lasting market access for their products.
The festival attracted large numbers of women residents from Clifton, Defence Housing Authority, Bath Island and surrounding areas.
Visitors included SRSO Chairperson Naheed Shah Durani, Secretary Universities and Boards Muhammad Abbas Baloch, Brigadier Wajid Mahar, former Inspector General of Police A.D. Khuwaja, University of Sindh Vice Chancellor Abdul Fateh Mari, MPA Qasim Siraj Soomro, MPA Muhammad Saleem Hingoro, Brigadier Aziz Menon of Kings Group and Irfan Baloch, alongside businesspeople, journalists and anchorpersons who praised the work of the women entrepreneurs.
Sindh’s embroidery and craft traditions remain one of the province’s few home-based income streams available to women in districts with limited formal employment. The recurring constraint is not skill but distribution — artisans in Umerkot or Kashmore rarely reach buyers in Karachi’s higher-spending neighbourhoods without an intermediary who takes the margin.
Exhibitions of this kind compress that supply chain for a weekend, letting producers sell directly at retail prices. The longer-term test, industry observers note, is whether the contacts made at such events convert into standing orders once the stalls come down.
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