GI tag a boost for Uppada sarees

The intellectual property right has given weavers a fresh lease of life with the commercial leverage to enhance their incomes

P Lakshmaiah, a 57-year-old master weaver from Uppada, a coastal village in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, toiled for about 10 years weaving the rich tapestry of the Jamdani fabric. Yet, his earnings did not exceed Rs 10,000 a month — and a major portion of this went towards paying mounting debts.

Since 2009, however, things have changed for the better. That was when the traditional Jamdani weaving technique – wherein no mechanical aids are used to create rich patterns using gold and silver zari – adopted by the Uppada saree weavers received a Geographical Indication (GI) registration.

The GI is the intellectual property right that restricts others from marketing or processing a product with the same name.

“This dismal situation for eking out a living persisted till last year. With the GI tag, we are out of the hand-to-mouth existence and are now seeing a larger market for our sarees both domestically and internationally,” says Diawam Gangadharam, president of the Uppada Handloom Industrial Cooperative Product Sales Association.

From 800 last year, the number of looms at Uppada has increased to 1,500, and so has the number of sarees woven. It takes a month for a weaver to produce one Jamdani saree.

Uppada sarees are priced between Rs 5,000 and Rs 80,000, going up to over Rs 3 lakh in the case of specially-ordered customised wedding sarees.

“Earlier, with the influx of cheap fabric in the market with the Uppada brand, we the local weavers gradually lost our business. But the GI status has given us the commercial leverage to enhance our income. We are now selling 50 sarees a month, each worth Rs 20,000, to showrooms like Kalamandir in Hyderabad,” says T Raju, proprietor of Uppada Sarees.

“Our association’s turnover grew two-fold from Rs 2 crore per month last year,” Gangadharam says. However, things are still not very rosy for weavers here. “We need 100 labourers to weave a saree and are at present facing a labour shortage of nearly 30 per cent, which extends the time-to-produce by an additional 15 days.”

The Uppada weaver community is also caught in the vicious circle of middlemen who fleece them by paying them paltry amounts. Added to this is the steep rise in silk prices — from Rs 1,600 per kg last year to Rs 2,600 per kg at present.

“We are demanding that the government provide silk at a subsidised rate, besides allocating funds to set up shop in Delhi, which will cut out the middlemen menace from the picture. We have been representing these problems to the government since last year, but haven’t been given a hearing,” laments Gangadharam.