At the Bon Birsingha village in the Bankura district of West Bengal, for generations, silk weaving has been a trade that many families have embraced. Almost every household in this village is involved, from fabric weaving, and weft winding to sometimes dyeing the fabric. All processes lead to the production of a beautiful silk saree.
But the production is straitjacketed in age-old practices of the raw material being supplied by a village mahajan, traditionally the man in the village with the capital, to buy raw silk. Interventions from the state government, including the setting up cooperatives to improve the rural silk industry and provide raw materials, have been important, but their influence seems restricted.
The broad template of saree weaving remains that of the Mahajan (a term associated with the village money lender or a man of influence, wealth and contact in the village) dictating the terms of production and deciding how much money goes to the saree weavers. But shouldn’t an actual producer of the saree, move away from such a model and carry out production that allows for more degrees of freedom, collaboration and the possibility of earning more? Is that thought disruptive to an existing system or is it a viable alternative throwing up new rural entrepreneurs?
It is in this space that SwitchON, a non-profit based out of Kolkata with a focus on climate resilience and five more NGOs, has invested their efforts through the Udyamini initiative to intervene and help the women weavers take an important first step towards being a successful entrepreneur. Udyamini project, according to Sumedha Kundal from SwitchON, has been planned in several stages that are connected to each other. The first phase began in June 2023, the first year of the project. “This was mostly concentrated on establishing the area of work, including identifying potential rural women entrepreneurs and conducting some evidence-based studies and research”, she adds.
Simultaneously, Udyamini carried out a key aspect of their vision where they also want to build an ecosystem of entrepreneurs through partnerships. Rimpa Haldar from Bon Birshinga village joined that discussion.
Rimpa is one such individual walking with Udyamini with the same vision. In her thirties, Rimpa has been in the silk weaving business for almost a decade. After her marriage, Rimpa moved to this village post marriage and slowly picked up the threads and the skills to weave a saree. She is a member of the Birsingha Mahila Silk Handloom Producer group and with her husband proudly displays the sarees she crafts with her skills. Still, Rimpa sells her saree to a mahajan. This only shows how deep-rooted the old system is.
Rimpa shares how this system works, “I have been in this work for the last 15-16 years. We have a mahajan system here. That’s because we do not have enough capital to buy raw materials and do this on our own. So we take the silk threads from the majahan and weave it and the mahajan gives us some money and takes it back”.
She shows us a saree and explains the process of weaving, the price it will fetch in a market and how much of it would reach those who weave the saree. “A saree (like this) sells in the marketplace for over Rs 3,000. To get the saree in this form, we would dye the silk, dry it in the sun and go through several other processes of getting the coloured thread before we get weaving. For all of this, we get 500 rupees for one saree. There is a profit of at least Rs 1,000 per saree.”, she says. It takes about 15 days to get to the weaving process and three days to weave a saree. When it’s two people working together then the weaving can be completed in two days, Rimpa adds. In a regular week, we learnt that three sarees can be woven and that would roughly fetch about Rs 1,500.
For SwitchON, the basic model remains of women’s entrepreneurship and producing Silk Handloom with Clean Energy. Weavers like Rimpa see hope in the first initiatives taken by the foundation “We are trying to step out of the mahajan system and do our work independently. This is where we hope we will be able to hold hands with the SwitchON foundation and walk together. I will gain out of it and if I can get ten more women to work with me then they too will earn a little more for their family”.
The hope she says, is to be able to buy the raw material, bypass the Mahajan and sell the saree in the market.
Weavers identify three barriers to swift work. One is the frequent power cuts which stop weaving, making it impossible to even carefully look at the thin threads. The second is drying the threads. The third barrier is one of dependency on the mahajan and the inability to buy threads and market one’s work.
Several other voices join in with Rimpa and this includes a weaver couple. This includes Dipa Das and her husband Nabin Das, who have been in the weaving business for as long as they can remember. Nabin is also a member of a weaver’s cooperative that gets some help from the government through loans to buy raw materials for weaving. There are 100 shareholders in that cooperative, he informs, of which about 40 are actively involved in weaving. Even there, the Mahajan cannot be bypassed for marketing.
“If we can directly sell in the market then the profit will be more”, insists Nabin.
From the same village, Saraswati Dhara, Chairman of the Birsingha chapter of the
Cooperative Society or the Birsingha Ekata Sangha Samabay puts her hope in SwitchON Foundation’s initial training. She thinks that if women can buy their machines and subdised silk threads it might help them finally to be entrepreneurs on their terms.
SwitchON remains aware of these problems and has taken steps to address them. Resham Sutra, an important part of the handloom value chain, addresses one such problem in work disruption through power cuts. Resham Sutra, which develops affordable innovative solar-powered silk reeling machines is an integral part of SwitchON’s vision of rural entrepreneurship.
“SwitchON Foundation has signed an important Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Resham Sutra to promote DRE-based reeling machines for the handloom workers and also they will be developing some centres where training will be provided to rural entrepreneurs on how to use those solarized reeling machines”, Sumedha Kundal from SwitchON tells us.
SwitchON has also spoken to Manjusha and Tantuja, the showrooms of the West Bengal Handicrafts Development Corporation Limited to promote and market the handloom products.
“The government of West Bengal has launched a credit card scheme called West Bengal Bhabiswath Credit Card Scheme (WBBCCS) by the Department of Micro Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) and Textiles which aims to support two lakh youth annually across West Bengal with loan up to 5 lakh rupees for income generating projects in manufacturing sector, trading and services”, Sumedha Kundal of SwitchON informs us. Such a scheme bolsters the weaver’s dream with eligible candidates between 18-55 years receiving a subsidy of 10 per cent on the total project cost up to 25,000 and a bank loan at a 4 per cent interest rate. This is further strengthened by SwitchON maintained through Udyamini which is mandatory for all MSMEs under the MSMED Act.
“We are trying to be the facilitator in all this and not the middleman. The middle man is an issue…when we talk about the silk handloom value chains due to lack of capital, the weavers fear starting their businesses”, Sumedha of SwitchON explains the problem. Driven by this fear the weavers end up with the middle-man because in that manner there is an assurance of their product getting sold.
“They let go of justified prices. Here, SwitchON would come in and would like to facilitate, not as a middle man but as a support and to build the capacity of the rural women entrepreneurs”
For now, that promise and a new collaboration seem to be slowly unfolding in this corner of Bengal.
Also Read: How SwitchON Foundation can propel Bengal’s rural women entrepreneurs into the modern age