BHUBANESWAR: Intricately designed Sambalpuri Ikat sarees lay in a large pile amidst empty sacks of yarn and heaps of broken, colourful threads in Sukanti Meher’s Barpali home. The national award-winning weaver from Bargarh, who employs 20 others of the block, has no raw material to work on. Usually, she creates her own designs, dyes the threads and hands them to weavers. With transportation halted, Sukanti is unable to procure raw materials and her weaver colleagues are without work.
The weavers, who earned at least Rs 5000 a month depending on the sarees they weaved, are now left with just Rs 500 each that Sukanti provided them earlier this month to buy vegetables and grocery.
In Barpali block alone, there are 3000 weavers who produce beautiful Ikat sarees under the guidance of master weavers. None has any raw material left. The global health crisis has left them fending for themselves. With lives at stake, living at subsistence level, exquisite art seems a luxury even the artist cannot afford.
The Government, on its part, provided PDS rice for three months and financial assistance of Rs1000 to weavers covered under social security schemes but that is not helping. “We need raw materials. If we do not weave and sell, where will we get our earnings from? Like agricultural produce, Government should permit transportation of raw materials for weaving”, suggests Simanchal Meher, a weaver of Sonepur.
Barely 10 km away, Balijhori - Odisha’s only Sambalpuri saree haat - wears a deserted look. A month back, it was bustling with activity with weavers thronging the market located on Bargarh-Barpali road every Friday to sell their products directly to buyers from across the State and outside.
A once-a-week affair, the haat witnesses transactions worth at least a crore of rupees. With virus scare on the prowl and social distancing the new normal, the marketplace has fallen silent. Bargarh district, home to 14,737 weaver households belonging to Kostha and Bhulia Meher communities, is known for tie-and-dye, Tussar silk and cotton weaving. The Bargarh handloom cluster is the biggest in the State comprising weavers from Barpali, Bargarh, Bijepur, Sohela, Bheden and Attabira blocks. At least 10,000 weavers from these blocks depend on the Balijhori haat to trade their creations.
Almost all of them have lost their livelihood. The weaves that they completed prior to March 24 when lockdown was imposed are now stuck in godowns. The markets are closed and there is no transportation. “Our payments are blocked and we have no raw materials to weave”, says Tikeswar Bag, a native of Talminda village in the district. Tikeswar sold sarees and other handloom products that his father and brother weaved but since the lockdown, the family business has shut down. According to an estimate, Odisha has 42,953 weaver households and 27,857 of them are in Western Odisha alone. As per the 4th Handloom Census carried out last year, the State has at least 1,17,836 weavers including 53,472 primary weavers and 64,364 allied weavers.
There are 72 weavers’ clusters and the number of looms stands at 43,652. Similarly, there are 530 weavers’ cooperative societies in the State, majority of them in Western Odisha. With the handloom sector employing the highest number of people after agriculture, ripples of the crisis are being felt by weavers’ community in other parts of the State as well. And the worst hit are the ones not covered under any cooperative fold. Weavers under cooperative societies supply their finished products to either Sambalpuri Vastralaya or Boyanika, which assures them a steady flow of work and remuneration. Those outside of it, wait for work orders from master weavers, private buyers and designers. The lockdown has not only hit raw materials supply but deprived them work and livelihood.
Raw materials like cotton and silk yarn apart, dyes are supplied to weavers under cooperative fold by Bhubaneswar-based National Handloom Development Corporation (NHDC) which procures cotton from Erode and Coimbatore, Mulberry silk from Bengaluru and Malda silk from West Bengal. All the handloom clusters in the State producing silk sarees use Mulberry silk except Nuapatna weavers who weave Khadua Pata with Malda silk. The NHDC sends raw materials to 54 raw material banks located in different districts and cooperative societies collect them for supplying to weavers. Dyes, similarly, are purchased from West Bengal, Mumbai and Gujarat. Independent weavers or those working under master weavers procure raw materials directly from wholesalers in these areas.
However, with transportation closed and labourers not available, raw material supply has collapsed. Adding to the crisis, all 54 raw material banks are closed. Only in a few cooperative societies that had stocked yarn and dyes prior to the lockdown, weavers were supplied a part of their raw materials after lockdown restrictions were relaxed on April 20. “For independent weavers like us, there is no certainty when we will receive our raw material stock because even after lockdown is lifted, labourers would not immediately return to yarn and dye producing factories”, said Arjun Pal, a weaver of Bidharpur village in the Nuapatna panchayat of Cuttack district.
He requires around 20 kg of yarn every a month.
In Nuapatna, famous for Khandua Bandha saree and dress materials, the cotton and silk yarn has been exhausted and weavers do not have the black and red dyes – the two primary colours. This panchayat is home to at least 5000 weavers and one of them is Arjun who works for a few designers. “The yarn godowns in the village are empty. Bandha (tie and dye) has also been stopped because we need at least five persons to sit together and social distancing guidelines do not allow it”, he explains. Similarly, at Maniabandha which is also famous for its Bandha sarees, the raw materials were provided by local weavers’ cooperative society on April 21 but independent weavers haven’t managed to procure silk threads.
Plight of weavers in Ganjam, famous for its ‘Phoda Kumbha’ Berhampuri Patta and Bomkai cotton sarees, is no different. Raj Kishore Das, a weaver of Chamakhandi village under Chatrapur tehsil, says different kinds of threads are used in a single saree. “Currently, some of us have threads for weaving body of the saree but there are no threads left for weaving the Pallu. Hence, weaving has been put on hold till supply resumes”, he said. The district is home to around 2700 weavers of whom, 700 are under cooperative fold. Senior officials of both Sambalpuri Vastralaya and Boyanik claim that payments against sarees and other handloom products delivered by weavers across the State were cleared till March 31. Meanwhile, Minister of Handlooms, Textiles & Handicrafts, Padmini Dian said the department is working out ways to help affected weavers including an extended financial assistance. “But we cannot do anything before the lockdown is lifted,” she said. Till then, the looms remain silent.