Ayodhya, May 24 -- Amid the ongoing heatwave, women in Ayodhya are crafting eco-friendly hats, gamchas and ritualistic items using banana fibre as part of a training programme aimed at providing sustainable livelihoods and relief from extreme summer conditions.

Surya Kumar Tripathi, an official involved in the training programme for making hats, cotton towels, purses, and bags from the banana fibres, said that the main objective of the programme is to make the women self-reliant and utilise their free time to manufacture these products against the heatwave.

He explained that banana stems, which are usually discarded after harvesting the fruit, are being repurposed to extract fibre using machines, which is then used to make a variety of ...