ONGOLE: Owing to the incessant rain for the past one week, cloth business of Chirala town has been adversely affected. Chirala is known for its special handicraft sarees and there are around 1,000 wholesale and retail cloth shops in the town.
An exclusive cloth market, ‘Mahatma Gandhi Cloth (MGC) market complex’, alone makes on an average Rs 3 crore business daily. In view of the nearing Diwali festival, all small and big merchants would have seen the festive rush and made huge profits. But due to the continuous downpour, the business has been facing losses.
“We were already facing problems with GST and intervention of middlemen or brokers in our business. Now, this continuous heavy rainfall ruined our Diwali seasonal cloth business. If it does not stop now, this festive season will be sad for cloth merchants,” M Srinivasa Rao, a medium-sized cloth merchant from Chirala RR Road said.
For centuries now, Chirala handicraft sarees have been famous across the country. In order to provide broad marketing opportunities to these artisans of Chirala town, in 1979, MGC market complex was set up.
Cloth from various places of the country including Ahmadabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Surat, etc., are brought to the market here.
“We visit Chirala twice or thrice in a month without fail to purchase around `1 lakh to `1.5 lakh worth of handicraft sarees along with other varieties from the MGC market complex. We further sell these in our known circles. Through this business, we are able to earn our livelihood comfortably. For the last 10 days, ahead of the Diwali seasonal sales, our stock of sarees have become exhausted but we are unable to bring more from Chirala due to the heavy rain. We suffered a loss of nearly `2 lakh,” I Vijayalakshmi, a business woman from Sumatra Nagar area of Ongole city told TNIE on Thursday.