FLO Lucknow, under the leadership of Chairperson Simran Sahni, hosted the Pickle & Mangodi Skilling Workshop by Navrasa, founded by FLO member Neera. The workshop did not happen in a training centre or a government hall. It happened in Devirukhara village, which is exactly where it needed to happen.
On 5th June 2026, Neera of Navrasa arrived with the materials, the knowledge, and a business model already waiting for the women who would walk through the session. Eighty of them showed up — and what they found was not a lecture on entrepreneurship or a motivational session about women’s empowerment. They found jars, raw mangoes, spices, and someone ready to show them how to take what they already know and make it good enough for the market.
The session covered three core skills: mango cutting at the volume and consistency required for commercial production, pickle making with attention to the proportions and processes that determine shelf life and food safety, and mangodi preparation — a traditional lentil product that requires technique to get right at scale. Running through all three was a thread of hygiene and food safety awareness — because the gap between a good home pickle and a sellable one is almost always less about recipe and more about process.
Women who have made pickles for decades found themselves learning to think about it differently. Not as a batch for the family, but as a product for a customer. That shift — from domestic maker to market producer — is subtle in language and significant in implication. It changes how you measure, how you store, how you label, and ultimately how you price what you make.
What made this workshop structurally different from most rural skilling interventions was the model Navrasa put in place alongside the training. Women do not graduate from this session into uncertainty, wondering whether anyone will buy what they now know how to make. They graduate into a direct supply relationship with Navrasa. Raw materials come in. Finished products go out. Wages are paid against output. The chain is short, the payment is direct, and the woman in Devirukhara who has always known how to make pickles now has acustomer who was waiting for her all along.