A company by the weavers, for the weavers and of the weavers

Kishen Lal is a happy man today. Toiling on his looms for years, he had never dreamt that one day he would be owner (shareholder) of a company. There are 249 weavers like him in Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh who are now proud shareholders in a private limited company formed by them. For them, July 30, 2010 will always be a day of reckoning as they received their first dividend certificates at a function held here on Friday.

This company is a result of Union government's effort to revive the handloom sector. With Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDI), Ahmedabad, as the implementing agency, ministry of textiles launched four-year Integrated Handlooms Cluster Development Scheme in Chanderi in 2006 to help handloom weavers meet the challenges of globalised environment.

Chanderi Handlooms Cluster Development Producers' Company Limited was registered initially with 10 members on May 29, 2008. Today, the firm has 249 shareholders (237 weavers and 12 weaver SHGs).

"It's a story of empowering weavers at grassroots level. Weavers were first organised in self-help groups (SHGs) and given exposure to exhibitions and sales to help them understand the production-to-marketing cycle. They realised that pooling of resources of SHGs is more fruitful than going solo with similar designs and limited means," says Tarun Bedi, faculty (EDI) & CDE, Chanderi/Gwalior.

"Weavers had their doubts though about availability of working capital, wage sustainability, availability of reliable market linkages, potential for conflicts in the distribution of profit and in their own capacity," says Mangilal, a weaver and in-charge of production planning, monitoring and quality control. To allay their fears, weavers were taken to Bunkar Vikas Sanstha to see how a federation worked.

"When the project was initiated, nobody was ready to accept that designs can be simplified and newer patterns can be introduced. Two months of training and a visit to an exhibition later, they began to create new designs as per the market requirements," says Sanjay Garg, a designer from NIFT, Delhi, whose services have been hired for design development and forming linkages with buyers.

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Posted in: Chanderi Handloom Cluster,Fibre2fashion,Handloom Cluster,Handloom Weavers,Indian handloom cluster,Integrated Handlooms Cluster Development Scheme