Toys Are Us.
“A highway sign screams Welcome to Channapatna, India’s Toy Town, as you enter. Whatever you imagine a toy town should look like, Channapatna will let you down. There is no toy museum, no toy street, no giant toys in the public square. It might dawn on you that there are hardly any toymakers.”
This para in a searing article on the disappearing toymakers of Karnataka has stayed with me.
I’ve always been mildly astonished at the disinterest in the toy industry by our policymakers. But events in 2020 have brought about a change.
First step : licenses for imports. Next : Mandatory BIS licensing for toymakers and now reports of toy clusters coming up in Koppal and Morbi.
Time will tell if these measures will help grow the industry . While safety and health regulation is vital for toy makers, the choice of licensing as the first policy intervention would likely make the industry wary.
So how about plucking some low hanging fruit?
“The Papofoxtrot Space Series are wooden toys modeled after some of our most advanced satellites, from U.S. spy gear to the solar system’s most advanced telescope to a machine that will incinerate trash in our atmosphere”.
This story from 2012 could have been a pitch perfect school-science initiative of ISRO and education ministries in states, could it not ?
Or how about the five women who make up a lego set? Alongwith university chairs named for women scientists, why not wooden toy sets on them to inculcate an interest in science among school going girls?
At a time when MSEs are struggling to stay afloat, how about :
a. A Reverse Buyer Seller Meet with the likes of M/s Jagwani and Gala? Can underutilised capacities at smaller garment units be used to produce soft toys?
b. Making design moulds in the struggling foundries/toolrooms of TN and producing some series of toys in factories hit by Single Use Plastic bans?
c. Building teams of design students from NID, Srishti and elsewhere and getting them to work with wooden toy makers in Channapatna and Sindhudurg for limited editions of, say, film merchandise?
d. Incentivising the setting up design and testing labs on the lines of common service centres (CSCs) rather than insisting each toymaker have inhouse facilities?
Toys are meant to be fun. They can bring about a sense of wonder, discovery, learning.
Will we discover? Will we learn?
There isn’t much fun spending coin on myself
For neckties and up-to-date lids,
But there’s pleasure tenfold, in the silver and gold
I part with for things for the kids.
I can go through the town passing store after store
Showing things it would please me to own,
But to thrift I am lost; I won’t reckon the cost
When I’m left in a toy shop alone.
