Cohan says

How can the products from the North-East compete with low cost crafts manufactured at scale ? Any design and marketing advice for young turks ?

The easy answer is to say that such products have to be positioned as premium offerings, carrying a price commensurate with the human involvement in their crafting.

In reality, the price difference will only be possible to maintain if it is possible to prove to a customer that the handmade products are different from the manufactured products. So there, a standards body will be necessary to certify the handmade products as such (assuming the mark of that body will have to be one that is widely recognized and believed in by the customers, that would suffice). If such a body is not available, it would be necessary to have outlets that are operated by trusted third parties. In Karnataka, for instance, the Government operated Cauvery Emporiums act as trusted outlets for handicrafts from Karnataka. So, anyone who makes a purchase at a Cauvery Emporium know that what they are buying is hand-made and deserving of a higher price.

Sikkim seems to have a number of products that might be offered as premium products — thanka paintings, tea, Tibetan crafts-work, etc., prayer wheels, and flags — but they’ll need to be possible to mark as hand-crafted to command a premium price.

Market Access is a challenge in states like Sikkim because of the terrain and geo-politics. What are the ways in which entrepreneurs from a state like Sikkim overcome these challenges.

It is possible to develop transport facilities for difficult terrain if the economics warrants the investment. In my home state of Kerala, the only reliable method for transporting tea for the first hundred years of the tea plantations was rope-ways. They required a huge investment, but it was justified by the profits the tea business could generate in those years.

If the economics of the organic tea business or any other business requiring the transport of large quantities of plant products become as attractive in the present day and time, similar “green transportation” systems might be possible to use around Sikkim.

But of course, the practical alternative right now would be selling IT services and similar offerings which do not depend on the availability of physical infrastructure.

About

Cohan Sujay Carlos: A Computer Scientist & Researcher in Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence with 7 patents, a few publications, and brief stints with Microsoft Research, IBM and Sun.

Aiaioo Labs focuses on natural language processing and machine learning. It developed a new kind of classifier called the Perplexed Bayes classifier that is an improvement on the naive Bayes classifier, were one of the first research groups to investigate intention analysis, a technology that augments sentiment analysis, and have investigated deep learning models.

Aiaioo Labs has been contributing to open source & donated a machine learning algorithm (a rock-solid implementation of the Naive Bayes classifier) to Apache OpenNLP (wrote the OpenNLP code for supporting this type of classifier). Aiaioo Labs also developed a framework for Arduino programming in Kannada, Hindi and Tamil.

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