Modi Stressed on Making Indian Handlooms a Fashion Trend

There is a need to take several initiatives to make handlooms fashionable, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while inaugurating the first National Handloom Day in Chennai.

“We have to understand the market needs and consumers' preferences. This can be done by bringing new designs and colour schemes, constantly evolving and innovating, ensuring quality. Fashion and design education in India also needs to be re-oriented,” Prime Minister Mr Modi said.

PM stressed that there is a need to make hand-loom tradition the center piece of fashion for India and the world.

“On 2nd October last year, I had asked people to use one item of Khadi to brighten the lives of artisans. I am informed that since then sale of Khadi has gone up by 60 per cent as compared to the same period last year,” Modi said.

He said there is a need to give a similar call for hand-looms now.

He called for enhancing the use of hand-looms in our daily lives stating there are many options such as clothes curtains bed sheets table covers door mats and rugs just to name a few.

This will not only support hand-looms but will also support our weavers, he said.

He also sought for several initiatives to make hand-looms fashionable by bringing new designs and colour schemes, constantly evolving and innovating, ensuring quality.

He said the fashion and design education in India also needs to be re-oriented.
Talking about the “Digital India Movement”, he said the scope of e-commerce for sale of hand-loom products should be enlarged.

As we develop markets for hand-looms we also need to extend support to our weavers on the production side, he said.

Assistance to individual weavers for building work sheds and purchasing loom and accessories will now be directly transferred to their bank accounts; he said adding that major steps have been taken for developing hand-loom clusters at the block level.

Earlier, assistance of only about 60 lakhs rupees was being given for one hand-loom cluster. This has now been increased up to 2 crore rupees, he said.

“Weaving is a very laborious job. In some cases, a weaver takes months to weave a single saree. We need to put in place systems that will ensure that they are paid their rightful wages. We also need to improve technology to enhance productivity and reduce labour in the pre-loom activity, he said.

To address financing problems of Micro, Small & Medium Industries the Government has announced the creation of a MUDRA Bank. This bank has a corpus of Rs 20,000 crores and a credit guarantee corpus of Rs 3,000 crores. MUDRA Bank would ensure that at least 60 per cent of the credit flows to loans of less than Rs 50,000, he said.