Skills training

Many of Kolkata’s poorest people are trapped in poverty because they have no skills to earn a decent living. Calcutta Rescue provides training to enable them to become self-reliant, through projects teaching weaving and handicraft skills.

Calcutta Rescue runs a handicrafts project that employs former patients, widows, women whose husbands are sick or unemployed, and former school students who need a practical trade.

The men and women working in the handicrafts project are trained in a wide variety of skills including sewing, embroidery and woodwork.
The project workers make the clothes that are given out free to Calcutta Rescue’s needy patients and schoolchildren, and they also make a range of Fairtrade-certified handicrafts that are sold locally and abroad.

Calcutta Rescue runs two weaving workshops in a rural area of high unemployment, training men as handloom weavers. As well as giving the men marketable skills, the project produces the cloth from which clothes, bed sheets, bandages and wound dressings are made for Calcutta Rescue patients.

Less academic students at Calcutta Rescue's schools are offered vocational training when they get older – for example, driving, tailoring, beauty care, mobile phone repair, and computer skills.