PM calls for enhancing usage of handloom in daily lives

5% increase in consumption will increase revenue by 33% to the weavers

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M Narendra Modi on Friday called for enhanced usage of handlooms by people. He said even a modest five per cent increase in consumption would push up sector revenues by 33 per cent, which in turn will help weavers. “The sector has inherent strengths that we need to market. Can we not enhance the use of handlooms in our daily lives?” Modi said in his speech after the launch of National Handloom Day and the India Handloom brand for products here on Friday. Modi said the handloom sector should take up innovation in design and production to make handloom products appealing to the youth. The e-commerce platform should also be used to sell handloom products, he said. Modi said the Union textiles ministry would hold design and marketing competitions foproducts.

He urged the film sector, which plays a major role in fashion, to use handloom and handicraft products in at least one in five movies.

According to Modi, the sale of khadi products had gone up by 60 per cent after his October 2 appeal to people to use at least one khadi product to brighten the lives of the producers.

Modi said handloom could be used for curtains, clothes, bedsheets, doormats, among many others.

He noted that Mudra Bank was created with a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore and a credit guarantee of Rs 3,000 crore to address the funding problems of small-scale units. He said nearly 60 per cent of the loan account size of the bank would be at Rs 50,000 levels.

Modi added that assistance to weavers would be directly credited to their bank accounts and the government has increased the funding assistance to handloom clusters to Rs 2 crore from Rs 60 lakh.

It is estimated that 4.3 million people are engaged in handloom weaving and allied activities in India.