Hyderabad: New Delhi-headquartered for-profit social enterprise Resham Sutra is striving to formalise the sericulture value chain by providing skills training, market linkage, and more stability to extremely poor communities. The company is replacing labour-intensive silk yarn production methods with reeling machines to eliminate thigh reeling and hard labour, making it possible to double reelers’ productivity and income.

The rural women in the sericulture segment indulged in ‘thigh reeling’, which led to cuts all over their skin and suffered from backaches and joint pains. Resham Sutra wanted to change this through mechanisation and advanced technologies. Till date, the company has commercialised seven user-friendly machines for silk workers through its Delhi facility. The first machine took two years to develop it, after several iterations.

The company has addressed initial maintenance challenges as the users never used any machines in their life before, through constant education, handholding, and redesign. The company provided service personnel at all the major clusters. The machines are hybrid with solar, electric, and manual options. Yarn making machines cost anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 40,000.

Resham Sutra enables India’s rural entrepreneurs to profitably produce and market a variety of silk and handloom products with a wide range of electric reeling, weaving, and spinning machines –most of them powered by solar energy – that contributes towards improving the working conditions as well as creating a predictable and higher income for over 10,000 silk workers in India.

Kunal Vaid, founder, Resham Sutra, told Telangana Today, in an exclusive interview, “We manufacture and distribute solar-powered silk-spinning machines to rural women in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, and other Northeastern States. We have deployed 14,000 machines so far in 14 States. In the South, we are largely working with the cottage industry in the villages. We have around 500 beneficiaries in Telangana and AP. Almost 95 per cent of customers are women who are in the age group of 30-50 years.”

Powering livelihoods The company has begun engagements in silk cocoon rearing with tribals in forest areas, silk yarn spinning and reeling with rural women and handloom weaving with traditional hand weavers in various States of India. Resham Sutra is a part of the ”Powering Livelihoods” programme jointly run by Villgro Innovations Foundation and Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW). This is helping to look at funding opportunities for growth, he informed.

Vaid added, “Resham Sutra’s machines run on solar power (8-10 hours daily on an average), thus overcoming the lack of poor or no electricity supply in several rural areas as well as eliminating the recurring costs for energy requirements. The machines operating on solar power collectively reduce emissions by around 6,000 tonnes per annum.”

Farm-to-retail value chain The company facilitates setting up of integrated farm-to-retail value chains and aggregating rural producers to launch producer-owned companies, which in turn facilitates a better share of product realisation for the rural producers and micro-entrepreneurs. “The company is going to introduce quality certification for the products and also has launched a digital platform to ensure B2B and B2C linkages to tap domestic and export opportunities,” he informed.

The company works with the Central Silk Board and various NGOs, government agencies, and rural entrepreneurs across various parts of India. Founded in 2016, Resham Sutra”s innovations have directly impacted thousands of rural women and their families. Over 300 women have been trained through the Rural Experience Centres in major clusters setup by the company.

Resham Sutra has won the Ashden Award (UK) for “powering rural businesses” and the ISHOW award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was also chosen as one of the ‘Top 10 startups in Agri-Tech’ by the National Startup Mission, Government of India in 2020.

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