Despatches from Choutuppal, where handloom weaver Shankariah committed suicide
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Choutuppal looks fairly prosperous, with a myriad ISD and Internet kiosks. But in this and other centres of the handloom industry in Andhra Pradesh, around 400 weavers, struggling to make a living, are estimated to have killed themselves in a single year. What is going wrong? A first-hand report by Safia Sircar
In 1997-98, an estimated 159 farmers committed suicide in Telangana. Forty-one cases of suicide were reported in Anantapur district, between September and November 2000. Sircilla in Karimnagar had 59 weaver suicides in 2001, while Dubbaka in Medak district witnessed 20 suicides. During August 2002, nine weavers took their lives in Nalgonda district. There are no official estimates, but weavers' cooperative societies estimate that 300-400 weavers committed suicide in 2001.
Forty-year-old Shankariah, a handloom weaver, committed suicide on August 14 last year, on the eve of India's Independence Day. He used to weave silk khatan saris for the Choutuppal Weavers' Cooperative Society (CWCS) in Choutuppal, 43 km from Hyderabad. Shankariah earned Rs 1,500 a month and his wife Vijaya says: "The six of us (two sons and two daughters) used to get by." But then came the issue of their 15-year-old daughter's dowry.
The weaver community, or padmashalis, spend as much as Rs 50,000-60,000, sometimes even Rs 100,000, on dowry. Shankariah simply couldn't afford it. "He used to worry a lot and blame himself for not being able to get a good match for our daughter," says Vijaya. Shankariah spent sleepless nights, lost his appetite, became aloof and began to get disinterested in his work. According to Dr G Jaganath, a psychiatrist at the Woodlands Asha Hospital in Hyderabad's Barakatpura area: "He displayed the classic symptoms of depression and anxiety. Suicide is an extreme step, taken by frustrated, depressed, impulsive people depending on their personalities and tolerance levels. For many, there is deep guilt: that they have done something wrong and are worthless." Shankariah's only wrongdoing was that he worked as a weaver, a neglected community in Andhra Pradesh.
There are many like Shankariah in Andhra Pradesh. "What option does a person have when the trade, passed on for generations, collapses," says Srisailam, another weaver from Choutuppal.
From the outside, Choutuppal looks better off than most towns. Its roads are paved, its houses cement-plastered. Intricate `muggus' welcome visitors into houses, rows of stores showcase colourful saris, huge advertisements promote the dream of rural India and a myriad shops display Internet and ISD facilities. But, appearances can be deceptive.
The daily earnings of a weaver vary between Rs 20 and Rs 150. Most households survive on around Rs 50. That's a monthly income of Rs 1,500 -- about the same as the World Bank's extreme poverty line of US $ 1 a day. Weavers work long hours, often as many as 14 hours a day.
The handloom sector is an important cottage industry in India. It employs more than 10 million workers and is second only to agriculture in providing employment.
The weavers have a number of work arrangements. There are those who are truly independent and manage their own production and marketing. Such weavers are rare in Andhra Pradesh. There are weavers who are members of cooperative societies. The societies supply them yarn, colour and dye, and later sell the products. About half of the weavers in Andhra Pradesh are members of cooperative societies. Then there are the individual weavers who work for master weavers who supply the inputs and sell the output. This is the dominant system in Andhra Pradesh. The master weavers produce more than three-quarters of all production in the state.
Says Ravinder: "I work for a master weaver, like 25 others. I get work from him. He gives me Rs 1,500. The rate they sell is fixed depending on the work and design of the saris. Khatan saris are sold for Rs 2,000, while semi-khatan sells for between Rs 1,200 and Rs 1,400. It takes four days to make a sari. (The workload) is heavy and the designs differ. Our whole family works, one cannot work alone. My wife and daughters do the spinning on the charkha and after it's fixed to the loom I thread the sari together. We can make six saris a month. One sari gets us Rs 300, so for six saris we get Rs 1,800. We work during the nights too."
However, there are not too many takers for these colourful saris, woven with such care and a lot of hard work. "Through the generations we have been weaving. Today the situation is bad. It wasn't like this earlier. Due to powerlooms our situation has worsened. There are no sales. APCO (the Andhra Pradesh State Handloom Weavers' Cooperative Society) is neither buying nor giving money in time. Also, our weavers' society is running at a loss," explains Srisailam.
APCO is the main weavers' institution in Andhra Pradesh. But it has a huge backlog of debts owed to primary cooperatives. APCO began to fall back on payments from 1992; in 1998 it stopped payments altogether. According to a note submitted on February 7, 2001, by the handloom and textile minister Padala Bhoomanna to chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, since January 1999, APCO owes the primary cooperative societies Rs 36.26 crore for the purchase of cloth, and Rs 10.32 crore for yarn. Such dues, coupled with an interest rate of 8.5% on loans taken from district cooperative banks, have resulted in the collapse of most primary societies.
According to Jos Mooji's September 2002 report `Welfare Policies and Politics: A Study of Three Government Interventions in Andhra Pradesh', there were approximately 171,660 handloom-weaving families in Andhra Pradesh in 198687. And 213,404 working handlooms. This number more than halved in the next decade. In 1995, only 40% of the handlooms that existed in 1987 were still in operation.
Yadgiri, business manager of the CWCS agrees. Shankariah was one of its 650 members from 16 villages. The CWCS has incurred losses to the tune of Rs 30 lakh. It has taken a Rs 43 lakh loan from the Nalgonda Cooperative Bank; the interest is Rs 6 lakh a year. It supplies to APCO, Handloom House and, earlier, to the Tamil Nadu-based Co-optex. The money used to come in directly. Now, a zonal centre oversees purchase and payments. In spite of making things easy, it's become a bureaucratic burden. "Ten-fifteen years ago, payments came in time. Now they come late. Almost 80% of goods were picked up; now it's barely 10-20% and that too not in time. So what work will the weavers have?" says Yadgiri.
Then there is the competition from powerlooms. It was estimated way back in 1974 that one powerloom could replace six handlooms. And that one powerloom worker would make 14 handloom workers jobless. In the middle of the 1990s, according to the statistics of the ministry of textiles, about 56% of cotton fabrics were being produced by powerlooms and about 36% by handlooms. The rest was being manufactured by mills. Today, more and more people in the lower and middle-income groups prefer synthetics and blended cloth. Handloom production is about 22% more expensive than powerloom. As Srinivas, production in-charge of the Pochampally Handloom Weavers' Cooperative Society says: "A handloom ikat sari costs Rs 1,100-Rs 2,000, while the same produced by a powerloom (with a similar look and design) costs Rs 300-Rs 500. Obviously, customers prefer the latter. The mills, along with the powerlooms, are able to make 200 saris a day, while we work with our hands."
No less important is the scarcity of yarn and dyes and the increase in their prices. Primarily due to a steep rise in the price of yarn, the handloom industry suffered in the years 1984, 1986, 1988 and 1991 (Abdul N, `Handlooms in Distress', Economic and Political Weekly, issue 31, 1996). Between 1986 and 1990, yarn prices increased by 50%-130%. There was an immediate increase following the 1991 budget, and then another increase of almost 50% between December 1993 and March 1994. Over the past three years, the prices of dyes, yarn and chemicals have increased by 300%.
While the handloom weavers have no market, the powerloom weavers face stiff competition from Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Once Chinese textiles begin to flood the markets, the weavers predict that even the existing demand will dry up. According to Asha Krishna Kumar's report `Silence of the Looms', in Frontline (April 14-27, 2001), over 1,500 looms once produced traditional cotton saris in Dubakka. Now, the figure has fallen to 700.
In 1991, the Centre launched a massive export drive for cotton and yarn. This led to a sharp increase in yarn prices and also production costs. Many master and independent weavers closed down. And many committed suicide. As Lalita Iyer reports in `Yarns of Despair' (The Week, April 22, 2001), Konda Kishtaiah, 34, a powerloom weaver from Mushtipalli village could not afford to support his aged parents and two daughters. His sister said: "They had come over and we talked late into the night. Little did we realise that they would return home and drink poison."
Meanwhile, state minister for handlooms and textiles, Padala Bhoomanna, says: "In Andhra Pradesh, suicides are normal. It should be discouraged and weavers told that life is a struggle." That's the political response for you.
In Pochampally, the NGO Society for Human Care, Agriculture and Rehabilitation of Rural People (SHARP) is strategically located above the rooms of the Pochampally Handloom Weavers' Cooperative Society. The NGO is headed by K Bhasker, who is also chairperson of the Pochampally Urban Cooperative Bank. Bhasker is rich, well connected and politically savvy. An armed guard stands outside his meeting room (he needs protection from the extreme left People's War Group). And his room is decorated with photographs of him in the company of chief ministers past and present. He recently got a project sanctioned by CAPART to train 32 weavers. He says: "I will also try marketing, since I have my own showroom in Hyderabad."
So what plans does the government have? The latest National Textile Policy 2000, published by the ministry of textiles, makes it very clear that meeting global standards and withstanding international competition are amongst its main policy objectives. The government hopes to turn 250,000 plain powerlooms into semi-automatic looms before 2005, and induct 50,000 shuttle looms. But, although the moves may help boost textile production and exports, they may not necessarily benefit the weavers as policies are poorly implemented. In 1996-97, the government spent Rs 141.47 crore on developing the handloom sector. The next year, 1997-1998, the sum was reduced to Rs 124.57 crore; in 1998-99, it came down further to Rs 94 crore.
The government's intentions may indeed be noble. One just has to go through the list of committees that have been set up. In 1945, an All-India Handloom Board was instituted. In 1954, another committee called the Kanoongo Committee was set up. Twenty years later, the government set up another committee, the Sivaraman Committee. Then we had a committee called the Abid Hussain Committee. There was a policy, in 1985, called the 1985 Policy on Handloom. This resulted in the enactment of an Act called the Reservation Act. After 1974, another committee, called the Meera Sethi Committee, was constituted. And, in 1998, the Satyam Committee was established which has a controversial pro-globalisation slant.
Says 65-year-old Sitaramulu, who has a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi amongst the many pictures of gods and goddesses, in his two-room house: "No government schemes help, only the middlemen profit, not us. We do not want anything from the government, except three things. One, to stop the stealing of our designs; two, subsidise colour and yarn; three, market our products efficiently." After a while Sitaramulu says simply: "Gandhiji's charkha has become a thing of the past. It has lost its ideological value and become mechanical trash. I want to ask the government: Despite so many deaths, so many reports, so many interviews, we still continue to suffer. Why?"
(Safia Sircar is a journalist and development worker based in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.)
InfoChange News & Features, March 2003