Telangana handloom industry is weaving a new chapter
THE HANDLOOM SECTOR IN THE STATE OF TELANGANA IS PULLING ITS THREADS TOGETHER AGAIN DUE TO NEW INCENTIVES
Tradition often demands a price to be paid to keep it alive, but sometimes the cost can be too high for some. As the handloom industry in Telangana is challenged by industrial cloth mills and their cheaper imitations, traditional weavers, unable to cope in the face of staggering loans and receding profits, are being driven to suicide.
But all is not lost yet, thanks to individuals such as Sudha Rani Mullapudi of Abhihaara, a social enterprise based in Telangana.
Telangana produces some of the finest cotton weaves in India and boasts several handloom clusters. The region is well known for its Gadwal, Pochampalli and Narayanpet saris, to name some.
A sector that once thrived in the region under the patronage of the erstwhile Kakatiya kings, the Nizams of Hyderabad and the zamindars, it is now severely compromised due to a host of factors: rising costs, decentralisation of pre-loom activities, cheaper imitation products from cloth industries, and the changing preferences of consumers enamoured by the cosmopolitan globalisation of fashion, Mullapudi told Gulf
News, during a visit to a handloom exhibition in Dubai.
Earlier, the entire family was involved in the handloom weaving process, she said. Subsequently, with the rise in population and increasing demand, master weavers entered the scene and thus began the exploitation. They began to keep the artisans under their control. With pre-loom activities such as spinning and dyeing being farmed out to others, the weavers slowly lost their grip on skills as also their negotiating power and direct connect with the market.
Where there’s dependency, there’s exploitation, Kumari emphasised. It also did not help that the younger generations in the weaving community opted to seek jobs in bigger cities, moving away from their roots.
But thanks to the efforts of the Telangana government and intervention by corporate giants like Microsoft and NGOs such as Oxfam, UNDP and Abhihaara, there’s a renewed initiative to revive the dying sector, said Mullapudi.
“Our aim is to connect women across the cotton sup- ply chain — growers, weavers, garment makers and craft artisans — so that all of them are at a mutual advantage,” she said.
The Telangana government, she said, has come up with several incentives such as yarn subsidies, loan waivers and separating hand looms from power looms. Also, all handloom clusters are geo-tagged to ensure end product genuineness.
Also helping the cause is social media. With a renewed emphasis on ethnic chic, the passion and interest in actually visiting and buying directly from the weavers is on the rise, said Mullatepxutdilie . arna y are goingStt o ocoh a2m0p alA ly Narayanpe2 t o and see weavers aP t orCkl . , the weaver-buGyuel r coenwnsect is being revived,” she said.
Yet, damage cannot be entirely undone. “We have lost some of the finest weavers; had there been similar efforts about 10 years back, we would have saved them,” said Mullapudi.