In conversation with Kunal Vaid, Founder & Director, Resham Sutra.

1. How did Resham Sutra as an enterprise come into existence? What was the thought process and vision behind starting this enterprise and what have been your impact and achievements so far?

Resham Sutra is a social enterprise working with the mission of “making a difference, one rural home at a time.” The enterprise innovates and manufactures renewable energy-based rural livelihood enabling machines. The existence of the Resham Sutra got triggered with a visit of Resham Sutra’s founders to silk-producing villages in East India. This made them aware of the extreme agony and drudgery that rural women had to go through to make Tassar Silk yarn by reeling the thread on their thighs. The women had cuts on their skin and suffered from backache and joint pain; moreover, the work was socially looked down. They came back with a strong motivation to help these rural women and free them from the shameful process of “thigh reeling”. They strongly believed that in today’s age of advanced technology, there had to be a better way for them to do their work! And that idea/thought process laid the foundation of the Resham Sutra, which has till date has helped about 15,000 rural women earn better livelihoods with their machines.

Today, Resham Sutra offers a wide array of affordable machines for yarn reeling and spinning and fabric weaving. The machines are energy-efficient, enabling the use of solar energy for interruption-free work in rural areas. The machines contribute to improving work conditions for the rural textile producers and in multiplying their income two-fold.

Resham Sutra is focused on creating a positive socio-economic and environmental impact:
❖ Socio-Economic Impact: To date, Resham Sutra’s innovations have directly impacted about 15,000 families by improving their productivity and income through modern renewable power-based machines.
❖ Environmental Impact: Resham Sutra’s deployed machines – operating on solar power – have collectively reduced Green House Gases’ emissions by around 6,000 tons per annum already.

Resham Sutra’s impact sets up two virtuous cycles. The first cycle improves operational efficiency leading to an increase in the livelihood of the beneficiaries. The second cycle protects beneficiaries from occupational health hazards from practices like thigh reeling. In recognition of our innovations, Resham Sutra has won the prestigious Ashden Award from the UK for “powering rural businesses” and the ISHOW award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was also chosen as one of the ‘Top 5 startups in Agri-Tech’ by the National Startup Mission, Government of India in 2020.

2. How does Resham Sutra improve the lives and livelihoods of thousands of rural Indian women in the textile sector and free them from drudgery and lead them towards a better future?

Resham Sutra works with the vision of enabling, empowering, and organizing underprivileged rural textile artisan communities locally towards self-sufficiency and financial independence. And to do this, the company offers complete solutions to its rural customers providing them with end-to-end support including linkages for raw material sourcing and finished goods marketing as well as business support to manage their operations more effectively.

Resham Sutra’s products (machines) are installed and serviced through its network of field representatives. To this end, the company also partners with various NGOs, Government agencies, etc. across various locations.

3. Why and how are you setting up setting-up integrated Farm to Retail value chains? Please explain.

Resham Sutra is supporting tribal farmers in taking up silk farming. The support includes bringing eco-friendly techniques, holistic development, and better technology, as well as integrating silk farm-to-retail value chains through effective technology-based and other types of interventions.

The integration of farms into the retail value chain is extremely significant as it is bound to remove intermediaries at different stages to increase producers’ share of value. Also, the use of modern, solar-powered production equipment and sustainable business model can attract the young generation to this occupation and stem their mitigation to cities/urban areas in search of greener pastures. This in turn of course bodes well for the future of the craft.

For instance, Resham Sutra is facilitating the ‘silk farm to retail project’ in the tribal region Simdega in Jharkhand, where existing returns from land are extremely low and large tracts of land are left uncultivated due non-availability of irrigation. Here, Resham Sutra is promoting mulberry plantation with the tribal farmers — which has the potential to increase their income many-fold.

Here, the enterprise is setting up farming infrastructure with support from CSR arms of corporates in the region; building modern and sustainable agri-practices like using integrated watershed development, and building rearing houses using CSRB blocks. Over 200 acres of plantation has been developed by involving over 100 farmers and an additional 300 acres will be planted this year. Simultaneously, women in the community are being trained to make silk yarn and weave fabrics using Resham Sutra’s solar-powered machines.

4. Tell us in detail about Resham Sutra’s Rural Experience Centres or RECs. How are women especially supported or trained by these Centres?

Resham Sutra has set up a number of Rural Experience Centres (RECs) in major rural clusters of India. These Centres provide complete buying support to customers including product demonstrations, test runs, financing support and after-sales training, and technical support. The RECs also support producers in villages to do value-addition of making yarn and fabric within their communities using locally available raw materials and further provide support for marketing and sales.

Interestingly, some of the RECs of Resham Sutra are owned and operated by local women. The RECs usually at first train the rural women for 2-4 weeks to make yarn or fabric. Post this training, the women are helped to form SHGs; this enables them to get into production activities more sustainably. Thereafter, the women are helped to procure machines and raw materials with financial support from Resham Sutra’s partner financial intuitions.

The beneficiaries are prompted to think and act like independent entrepreneurs from the beginning. At the same time, they get the benefits of belonging to a larger group of people doing the same activities. Through existing networks and with help from the Powering Livelihoods team, we identify and engage reliable and established women’s cooperatives that have a shared interest in supporting women end-users.

5. Resham sutra is being supported by Powering Livelihoods, a CEEW-Villgro initiative. Mention how this initiative is helping Resham Sutra to achieve its goals and to grow and scale?

The Powering Livelihoods program jointly run by CEEW and Villgro Innovations Foundation aims to boost India’s rural economy by scaling up the penetration of clean energy-powered appliances for livelihoods.

For us at Resham Sutra, the support from Powering Livelihoods is helping to scale up our operations and widen the area of impact. We have been able to expand the initiatives like setting up of RECs, deploying ‘Pay as you go’ technology for inclusive financing, and establishing rural infrastructure for the beneficiaries with their support. Additionally, the program is helping us deploy a gender lens to make us more inclusive and responsive to customers, employees, and other beneficiaries, as well as to build data-based evidence for the impact generated by our work.

6. What are your future plans going forward for building and creating sustainable livelihoods for the rural poor?

In the months and years to come, Resham Sutra will continue to create sustainable livelihoods for the rural poor by providing them healthy farm and non-farm-based employment options — which leads to diversification of income sources and cushioning them from agrarian crisis. As the majority of the enterprise’s beneficiaries are women, Resham Sutra intends to engage with them to create conducive working conditions and empower them economically. To achieve this, Resham Sutra will parallelly continue to fortify its forward and backward linkages across the rural textile value chain.

Resham Sutra also has plans to introduce a digital platform that will enable rural producers to manage their business better and find a wider market online. Further, the company has also already introduced quality certification and standardization of rural produce, which we believe will increase trust amongst different market players and enable more commerce. In the near future, we are looking at more options for customer financing and engaging institutional actors for the same. We also intend to grow and expand more in the Eastern and North East parts of the country as there is substantial untapped potential for growth in these regions.