Just Change India Producer Company Information

The concept behind Just Change was born out of our collective experiences and lessons learnt from working with poor communities over three decades. The first was Stan Thekaekara’s experience in the ’70s in what was then Bihar (now Jharkhand). By mobilising the adivasis to sell their produce collectively to bigger buyers higher up the market chain, they were able to bypass the local exploitative trader and secure a better price. But Just Change finally began to take shape more recently in the late 90’s when the adivasis of Gudalur started looking for market alternatives to sell their tea. The adivasis thanks to a successful land rights campaign had managed to reclaim their ancestral lands and had planted it with tea. And moved from being agricultural labourers to tea planters. But it also meant that they had catapulted from a local wage economy into a global market economy over which they had little control.