Silk and cotton textile production has emerged as a major generator of employment in India. Silk sarees, dresses, and scarves have a special place in weddings and other ceremonial occasions in almost all communities. Prized throughout history for their quality and diversity, silk products have been gaining market interest across the world.
Resham Sutra, an innovative start-up, by Kunal Vaid, has created a range of machines for the silk industry. With their highly efficient spinning and reeling machines for silk yarn production, being primarily powered by solar energy, they hope to empower women in the wild silk industry in India.
After completing his MBA from Management Development Institute, Gurugram, Kunal Vaid decided to join his family business Needlepointe Textile Products Pvt. Ltd. in Delhi.
Kunal worked with Needlepointe, which had partnered with the Jharkhand Government to market the world’s first organic certified silk products from the state, for nearly a decade.
In 2015, Kunal established Resham Sutra in Delhi to enable India’s rural entrepreneurs to profitably produce and market a variety of silk and handloom products and a wide range of affordable electric reeling, weaving, and spinning machines.
Resham Sutra, which translates to “silk thread,” situated in New Delhi, manufactures and distributes solar-powered silk spinning machines to rural women in Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and other Northeastern states aimed at replacing labor-intensive silk yarn production methods with reeling machines to eliminate hard labor and double a reeler’s productivity and income.
While sharing his entrepreneurial journey, Kunal says, “In order to improve the livelihoods of the workers, a key factor required to sustain improvements in productivity is the complimentary service.”
“We need to provide more than a technology to the customers”, he adds. Therefore, going forward too, the company also intends to place an equivalent emphasis on the provision of business support (accounting, basic marketing, etc.) to the workers to create a sustainable ‘farm to fabric’ ecosystem for them and plans to reach 10,000 weavers in the next 2 years for the same. Further, the company plans to expand to west and southern states and certain northern states as well in the coming years.
On the support from the government for this sector, Kunal highlights that there are incentives in the form of subsidy for looms and machinery, skill up-gradation training and marketing platforms for handloom organisations and weavers to sell the products to the consumers. He does note that despite these initiatives, a key barrier in accessing the financial support from government is the delay in subsidy disbursal which can range from several months to even past a year. Moreover, the implementation of the schemes is not necessarily consistent across geographies i.e. in certain cases, the end-user loan maybe get approved quickly but a similar loan proposal may not be considered in other areas. Thus, on the financing front, instead of relying on one source, the enterprise has been able to ensure provision of end-user financing from multiple sources which includes loans from government under MUDRA scheme, grants from Ministry of Textiles, tie-ups with MFIs such as Samunnati or partnering with organisations such as SELCO foundation. While the cost of the system is high for the targeted user, the payback typically ranges from 6 months to 1 year on account of an increase in productivity.
Most importantly, most of Resham Sutra’s machines are powered by solar energy, which vastly improves the working conditions and creates a predictable and dramatically higher income for over 10,000 silk workers in India.