Textile Ministry joins hands with Flipkart to empower weavers

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SME Times News Bureau | 25 Aug, 2014
The Ministry of Textiles has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Flipkart India Pvt. Ltd. through DC (Handlooms) to provide online marketing platform to handloom weavers to boost the handloom sector, empower the weavers and boost manufacturing in the country.

Minister of State (Independent Charge) Textiles Santosh Kumar Gangwar while speaking on the occasion congratulated the heads all the organizations and maintained that they must work tirelessly for the upliftment of weavers and ensure the success of the venture.

He mentioned that periodic review of the sales and progress of the weavers in the targeted clusters should be carried out.

The Minister emphasized that the focus of this association should be to help weavers and weaver entrepreneurs to produce products in tune with the buyer requirements and grow significantly so that they may become manufacturers not only at a local but also at a national level.

The MoU was signed in New Delhi in the presence of the Minister of State (Independent Charge) Textiles Santosh Kumar Gangwar, Secretary (Textiles), Sanjay Kumar Panda, Development Commissioner (Handlooms), Dinesh Kumar, Joy Bandekar, President Corporate Affairs, Ankit Nagori, V.P., Marketplace, Flipkart and other officials of Ministry of Textiles.

The MoU was signed by Dinesh Kumar, Development Commissioner (Handlooms) and Ankit Nagori, V.P., Marketplace, Flipkart.

Through this exclusive agreement, Flipkart will provide weavers in India online marketing platform, infrastructural support in data analytics and customer acquisition to help them get remunerative prices for their products and scale up their business.

The Ministry of Textiles, through the office of the Development Commissioner for Handlooms, is continuously striving to develop a strong, competitive and vibrant handloom sector to provide sustainable employment to handloom weavers.

The Ministry had adopted focused, flexible and holistic approach to promote and facilitate the continuous overall growth and development of the handloom industry through formulating, implementing, monitoring and reviewing of handloom policies, programmes and schemes; to support the handloom sector at large in upgrading skill knowledge, market infrastructure, living condition etc.

For marketing support, the Ministry of Textiles has taken many initiatives from time to time such as organizations of domestic marketing events, participation in international fairs and buyer-seller meets etc. However, in the present scenario of online marketing and net savvy consumers, it has been felt need to provide online marketing platform to handloom weavers so that exquisite handloom products of remote village is made available to discerning buyers.

This kind of a coordinated effort has been planned and executed for the first time with Flipkart for handloom weavers which will bridge the missing linkages of market intelligence, market access and logistics and help the Indian weavers in getting remunerative prices for their products. Flipkart will provide online marketplace for sale of the products of the weavers/master craftsmen/national awardees/state level awardees and the others as advised by Development Commissioner for Handlooms. Towards this end, they will go to the doorsteps of the above said since they do not have the brand, financial wherewithal to have a store leave aside in a town but not even in their village, no wherewithal to travel to market their products. Flipkart or their business partners will also have a collection centers to collect their products.

Flipkart, with its access to the largest customer base in the country, aims to help weavers make optimal use of the available data to guide entrepreneurs and artisans on areas such as deciding on the right selling price, payment automation, proper packaging, transportation, brand building etc.

The DATA analytics and market intelligence provided by Flipkart will help the weavers focus only on producing better saleable product ranges. This in turn will help them plan their production and inventory and expand their business, thus revolutionizing manufacturing in rural India and encourage entrepreneurship.

This partnership will connect the artisans directly to the buyer and the hand holding by Flipkart in guiding, packaging, collecting and delivering to the buyer will motivate the artisans in rural India. North East has skilled weavers with rich traditional motifs and designs, but due to the lack of market linkages they are not able to exploit the market potential. Similarly, Paithani and Himroo weaves from Maharashtra have tremendous value but are a dying art.