On a bright September morning, men and women in and around Surendranagar, about 120 km from Ahmedabad, gather at a handloom training center run by the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII), an autonomous body set up in 1983 . Group of Indian banks and financial institutions. Most of them are from traditional weaving families who are now struggling to catch up to the big changes in design, marketing and technology. Some of them are young, with little interest in the slow, possibly low-income handloom business, and are at the center of experts to learn the global prospects of the business and how to run it more professionally. .
Launched in 2019 as an initiative by HSBC-backed EDII and consulting firm EY, despite two waves of the pandemic, has grown into a massive project with far-reaching impact, with centers in Surendranagar and over 6,000 handloom training centers. There are five other clusters. Till now the other clusters where the weavers are trained are Bhuj in Gujarat, Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh, Kamrup in Assam, Bargarh in Odisha and Salem in Tamil Nadu. “Our primary concern is how to develop new designs, help weavers obtain credit and find new markets, and leverage new technologies to do so,” says Dr Sunil Shukla, Director General, EDII. Since most of the weavers belong to the informal sector, the training centers also help them to do business in a structured fashion, and enroll as enterprises for better visibility and viability.
The Indian handloom sector has a wide variety of products classified under ‘wearable’ such as thin cotton towels, saris, shirts, pants and shawls, and ‘non-wearable’, such as bags, purses, mats, caps, towels, beds Linen, rugs and curtains. In the Third Handloom Census (2009-10) about 2.8 million households were engaged in weaving and allied activities, 87 per cent in rural areas. About 65.2 percent of the total handlooms operating in the country are in the North East. The sector provides employment to 4.3 million weavers, mostly women, most of whom are illiterate or semi-literate. There is lack of credit, awareness of customer preferences, proper marketing and publicity, as well as technological backwardness, lack of new designs and weavers numbers.
The biggest challenge, says Shukla, is the apathy of the next generation in traditional business. To allay their hesitation and apprehension about new ways of doing business, a number of confidence-building measures had to be taken. Apart from training weavers to run their businesses as enterprises, EDII also helps organize exhibitions (virtual due to the pandemic), online buyer-seller meets and market development. 2020 saw interest from buyers from UAE, US and UK in a virtual exhibition. Weavers also need assistance in debt management as their past defaults have made banks wary of lending. After these interventions, the total sales of the products of these weavers have increased by 42 per cent, and the revenue has increased by 75 per cent, claims Shukla. Says Shukla, “It is something that has given us immense pleasure. Since 2019, 290 new handloom designs have been developed.
Rameshbhai Chauhan, 38, a weaver from Ahmedabad, joined his father’s family business after failing his class 10 exams. Their joint family was earning Rs 20,000 to 25,000 per month. However, two years ago, Chauhan joined the center of EDII and learned new design and digital marketing. His family now earns around Rs 50,000 a month, reaches out to customers even outside the state, uses WhatsApp to communicate with customers and share their designs. Chouhan says, “At a recent exhibition in Ahmedabad, I earned Rs 1.2 lakh in just two hours. Anand Rathod, another weaver benefiting from EDII, has been helping two young people set up their looms right from the start, and is also training other weavers in his village in digital marketing. Nothing, it seems, brings more happiness than paying it forward.
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