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Culture & Heritage

All published content in this sector: primers, practice notes, and organisation spotlights.

All Culture & Heritage Content

7 published pieces

Scheme Primer Grade A Culture & Heritage

PM Vishwakarma — Recognition, Tools, Credit and Markets for India's Traditional Artisans

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Org Spotlight Grade B Culture & Heritage

Dastkar — The Bazaar That Bypassed the Middleman

The Indian handicraft sector employs around 70 million people — the second largest source of rural employment after agriculture. It produces objects of extraordinary skill and cultural complexity: block prints that encode centuries of design vocabulary, weaves that require years....

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Practice Note Grade B Culture & Heritage

Intergenerational Transmission — Keeping Performing Arts Traditions Alive

The research on traditional performing arts transmission in India and globally — drawing on UNESCO's ICH documentation literature, field evidence from Sangeet Natak Akademi studies, and evaluation of Chhau safeguarding programmes — consistently identifies three conditions that mu...

9 min read Read →
Practice Note Grade B Culture & Heritage

Community Cultural Tourism — Designing for Equity, Not Spectacle

This note is about doing better than that. The evidence exists on what works. The design principles are clear. Applying them requires more patience and more genuine partnership than most tourism development projects are structured to allow.

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Practice Note Grade B Culture & Heritage

Oral Tradition Documentation — Community-Accessible Archives for Tribal Odisha

The instinct of most organisations approaching oral tradition documentation is to create an institutional archive: a well-curated collection of audio recordings, video footage, and transcripts held in a university library, a tribal research institute, or a national archive. This....

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Practice Note Grade B Culture & Heritage

Artisan Market Development — Provenance, Certification, and Premium Access

A Pattachitra painting produced by a Chitrakara family in Raghurajpur with three generations of practice, using traditional natural pigments, following the traditional compositional grammar of the form — and a Pattachitra painting produced by a factory in another state using synt...

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Sector Primer Grade B Culture & Heritage

Culture & Heritage in Odisha: Living Traditions in a Changing World

In Raghurajpur, a village ten kilometres from Puri on the banks of the Bhargabi river, every household is an artist's studio. The Chitrakaras — the painter-caste families who have lived here for generations — wake before dawn to prepare their natural pigments: the red from hingul...

17 min read Read →