CG medal winners to adorned by Chanderi fabrics

Medal winners of the approaching Commonwealth Games to be held in Delhi would be adorned with the outfits, made of popular Chanderi fabric, named Angvastram.

The Madhya Pradesh Handloom and Handicrafts Development Corporation is producing this special apparel as it has bagged the contract of supplying 1,375 specially designed Angvastrams, informed the officials.

The winners of the Commonwealth games, to be organized in the month of October, will be presented Angvastram with Commonwealth Games Mono and Mascot Shera, along with the medals.

For the past one year, officials of the corporation had been in contact with the organizers of Commonwealth games and about six months ago the Games Committee had approved a sample of Angvastram.

The committee had given a deadline of September 15 to the corporation to supply the decided amount of specially designed apparel.

Chanderi is a settlement in Ashok Nagar district and is about 300 km from Bhopal and weaves a a specific handloom textile known by its place of origin. Chanderi fabric has been woven since many centuries by a group of weaver communities and is widely known for producing high quality sarees.

Beside sarees, chanderi weavers now also produce various textile items such as fabric for ladies suits, running fabric, tops, stools, home furnishing items such as table cover, runner, napkin, cushion cover and curtains.

Chanderi cloths are available in silk, cotton and silk-cotton blend. Embroidery work is done as part of weaving; giving tenacity to the embroidery that is unique to chanderi fabrics.

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Smiling Face of Chanderi Weavers(A Full Circle)

The Government of India has adopted a Cluster approach for a focused development of Handloom weavers. Office of Development Commissioner Handlooms, Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, took imperative step to nurture, promote and develop the exclusiveness of the handloom sector. In the first phase 20 Pilot clusters were selected across 12 States of the country. Several innovative strategic approaches brought the success to its credit under the four year programme. The turn around story of the Chanderi Cluster was one of them. For the development of Chanderi Cluster, the weavers of Chanderi were organized into small Self Help Groups which further formed a federation i.e.; Chanderi Handlooms Cluster Development Company Limited, ensuring the participation and transparency for realizing the benefits to its weaver members.

With focused intervention activities past 3 years in the areas of raw material procurement, design development, process up-gradation, dying & coloring, direct marketing & Exports through Building/Strengthening of institutions, up scaling the facilities available infrastructure was strengthened by ensuring quality dyeing the in house dye houses using VAT, Acid and Vegetable Dyes. A fully equipped Common Facility Centre was constructed in an area of 3000 sq. ft. to provide facilities for operating colour & yarn bank; testing of yarn & fabric; showcasing new designs; sample development and other facilities to local weavers at nominal operating charges, with the help of Public & Commercial service providers, Chanderi cluster achieved positive growth thereby improving well being of more than 2500 Handloom weavers & their families through social security by way of Health Insurance cover worth Rs.15000/- to the weaver and his family and life insurance cover to the Handloom weavers & families.

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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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Weavers turn producers in Chanderi handloom cluster

The Chanderi Handloom Cluster in Madhya Pradesh was identified under the Integrated Handloom Cluster Development Scheme of the Office of the Development Commissioner for Handlooms in2006-07.

It is now reaping fruits of the interventions made under the scheme for the 3000 Handloom Cluster Weavers. For the first time the handloom weavers are organized into a Producers’ Company which is a legal entity representing 50 Self-Help Groups (SHGs).

The Producers’ Company was constituted in 2008-09 (vide a new enactment in the constitution in the year 2004) which facilitated equal sharing of dividends to all members.

Each weaver/member associated with it purchased 10 shares of Rs.10 each in 2008-09 and the initial 10 subscribers increased to 249 members by end of 2009-10.

The weavers’ SHGs (of which more than 35 were women SHGs) were provided market exposure through exhibitions and sales so as to make them understand the techniques of marketing the products.

The interventions of Office through the Development Commissioner for Handlooms provided design support through the NIFT qualified designer Shri Sanjay Garg, infrastructural support and marketing linkage i.e. both forward and backward linkage.

This enabled the existing skills of weavers to be showcased at appropriate forum in State and National level exhibitions. The marketing efforts resulted in securing orders with large renowned retailers like Life Style, CCIC, Tahiliani Designs, Raw Mango, Utsav, Kamla, Sutra Marketing Pvt. Ltd. Delhi, Shades of India, Ahilya Creations, Mumbai, Realm Exports, Pantaloon etc.

Participation in 85 exhibitions across the country and 18 Buyer Seller Meets have resulted into orders worth Rs.2.62 crore for the cluster.

Smt. Rita Menon, IAS, Secretary (Textiles) visited Chanderi Handloom Cluster along with Shri R.N. Choubey, D.C. (Handlooms) on 30.7.2010 to distribute dividends accrued to the shareholders during 2008-09 and 2009-10.

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