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How Social Enterprise Resham Sutra Brings Sustainability To Silk Rearing

Bringing sustainability into silk rearing is not an easy task. Delhi-headquartered social enterprise Resham Sutra does this and a lot more.

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By: Bayar Jain Published: Jun 30, 2022 04:20 PM IST

How Social Enterprise Resham Sutra Brings Sustainability To Silk Rearing

Bringing sustainability into silk rearing is not an easy task. Delhi-headquartered social enterprise Resham Sutra, however, does this and a lot more. The team help uplift weavers and rearers of Jharkhand, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh by providing them renewable energy-based rural livelihood enabling machines, connecting them with micro-financing institutions and bank loans, and empowering local communities. Founder-director Kunal Vaid reveals more. By Bayar Jain

T+L India: Tell us about Resham Sutra and how it came into being.

Kunal Vaid: Resham Sutra is a social enterprise that innovates, manufactures and supplies renewable energy-based rural livelihood enabling machines. Founded in 2016, Resham Sutra helps India’s rural silk yarn producers and fabric weavers to install higher productivity yielding machines, which in turn increases their income as well as reduces physical drudgery and mental stress. We have developed a wide range of affordable yarn and fabric-making machines – most of them powered by solar energy – that contribute towards improving the working conditions and creating a predictable and dramatically higher income for over 15,000 rural textile producers in India.

Resham Sutra

Resham Sutra dates back to several years with a chance visit to a few silk-producing villages in Jharkhand. We saw how the women were making silk yarn by rolling it on their thighs. This resulted in cuts all over their skin, backaches and joint pains. Moreover, their work was looked down upon socially. Pained with this experience, we came back with a strong feeling that something must be done for these rural women to free them from the shameful process of thigh-reeling. And soon, we started working on making a machine that would provide these women with better productivity, and better quality and free them from pain. This initiative later blossomed into the formal foundation of Resham Sutra. Today. Resham Sutra is a part of the ‘Powering Livelihoods’ programme jointly run by Villgro Innovations Foundation and Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

T+L India: What were the challenges you faced when providing solar-powered machinery to the reelers and weavers?

Kunal Vaid: At the ground level, we have been facing several challenges when providing solar-powered machinery to the reelers and weavers. For instance, the majority of women that Resham Sutra reaches out to across states do not have enough funds to buy machines. So, we have had to connect them with the available Government subsidy plans.

Secondly, we also try to connect them with various micro-financing institutions and bank loans. These women need to be financially educated to make them understand what ownership is all about and how they can become micro-entrepreneurs.

T+L India: Tell us about the ‘silk farm to retail project’ in the tribal region of Simdega in Jharkhand.

silk farm to retail project’

Kunal Vaid: Tasar silk production is a forest-based agro-industry that is being practiced by the tribal residents in jungles of Jharkhand. Tasar sericulture is gaining momentum in our country, as it creates more employment avenues for up to 2.5 lakh rural Indian families and gives high returns with low investment. We believe that the current value chain for both mulberry and Tasar silk can be made more efficient. Keeping that in mind, at our silk farm to retail project in the tribal region of Simdega, Jharkhand, we aim to integrate the value chain by intervening from the farm to the fabric production levels by engaging with actors at each level.

T+L India: Silk comes with its own share of environmental challenges and raises questions regarding sustainability, particularly with respect to sericulture or silk cocoon rearing. How does Resham Sutra factor this?

Kunal Vaid: India is home to four varieties of silk. The largest share of silk production is of mulberry, which is based on mulberry plantations; the other three varieties are Tasar, Eri and Muga that are grown in the forests. Silk production invariably leads to more tree planting, thereby helping to improve the green cover and related environmental benefits. The trees themselves are never cut for silk production, as the worms feed on leaves that grow back quite fast. In addition, today we are increasingly noticing awareness about sustainable and organic methods of silk production. As a matter of fact, India is the first country in the world that started producing certified organic silk!

Resham Sutra facilitates rural silk producers to take up sustainable processes, including use of organic additives and insecticides, providing training and support to build silk rearing houses using energy-passive mud block construction techniques, watershed development on silk farms and promoting the use of solar-powered machines for silk yarn and fabric production.

T+L India: Resham Sutra focuses its activities with—and for—the rural beneficiaries of Jharkhand, Orissa, and Chhattisgarh. Why did you choose these locations, despite having headquarters in Delhi?

rural silk producers

Kunal Vaid: We started our work in Jharkhand and then moved into Odisha, Chhattisgarh and other states as our solutions became well accepted and popular among rural women. Today, even though we are headquartered in Delhi, most of our work is focused on forest-based silk production techniques—which lags behind in terms of efficiency and productivity as compared to various other industries.

Wild silk cocoons grow naturally in the forest areas of these states, where Resham Sutra operates. The tribal women previously were just collecting the cocoons and selling them to traders from nearby areas. This would enable them to have some income once a year. Resham Sutra saw the potential of increasing their income and making it more regular, if and when they could do value addition on the forest produce. Therefore, making machines for silk yarn reeling emerged as an obvious outcome as the solution to the problems and challenges faced by these women.

T+L India: Where is Resham Sutra planning to expand next?

Resham Sutra

Kunal Vaid: North-East and Southern states of India. At the same time, we are planning to go deeper to support the rural producers throughout their entrepreneurial journey. We’re also planning to bring in better digital literacy and financial literacy for the rural producers through various interventions.

T+L India: A country that you think India can learn from with respect to silk rearing? Why so?

Kunal Vaid: I believe we do not need to look at any other country, as India itself has a great cultural heritage in arts and crafts. Our ancestors have found ecologically and financially sustainable ways for our arts to thrive through the ages. As a country, we need to wake up to the value of our traditional treasures and integrate these into our everyday customs and practices so they can thrive again.

T+L India: Best destination, according to you, for textiles and fabrics?

Kunal Vaid: We can feel inspired by India’s traditional practice of Khadi or household-based textile production, as we believe the same model of household products can be carried out as effectively at industrial levels as well. In fact, distributed micro-level production has a higher potential for introducing creativity and variety in the finished products. With some improvements of technology and business processes that can improve product quality, designs, and cost structure, rural India shall become home to the most ideal destinations for textile production.

T+L India: What next for Resham Sutra?

Rural Experience Centres

Kunal Vaid: We are looking to establish new Rural Experience Centres (RECs) and Rural facility Centres (RFCs). These centres will demonstrate various livelihood technologies to rural producers, provide training to the rural beneficiaries, handhold the rural women for establishing and operating micro-enterprises, provide financial and market linkages to rural producers, and provide digital and financial literacy to beneficiaries and well-equipped workspaces for rural producers, and so on. We are also planning to establish test labs for ensuring quality standardisation and brand building for certified and ethically produced, standard-quality products.

At the same time, we are looking to increase the adoption and implementation of Resham Sutra’s flagship Digital Platform along with the on-boarding rural producers onto the platform. The platform will strengthen the integrated farm-to-fabric value chain in the villages.

Related: Meet Daisy Tanwani, Whose Homegrown Brand Pinklay Takes Inspiration From Travel And Emphasises Sustainability

Written By

Bayar Jain

Bayar Jain

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