This organisation is bringing weavers into the digital era

Thread spinning on a wooden charkha, yarn created from cotton bolls to be dyed, and woven into intricate patterns, with precision and skill that knows no parallel. During his extensive travels across India's countryside, former journalist Osama Manzar always found himself fascinated with the amazing prowess of weavers and handloom artisans. At the same time, he found the duality of beauty and poverty that characterised these handloom village clusters utterly unfair. To ameliorate the dire conditions, Manzar felt that these villages needed to come into the 21st century. And one way to do that would be to arm them with digital information and social media platforms to design, archive and market their creations. Hence the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), founded in 2002, first started their work with their first handloom cluster in 2008.

Chanderi in Madhya Pradesh is home to some 3,500-odd weaver families that were earning less than Rs 2,000 per month, in spite of their exquisite designs. This village became the first of 10 handloom clusters that the DEF worked with. They were taught photography and software skills so that they could document the motifs used in their weaves.

In a culmination of their success, the DEF worked in tandem with designers Three, Indigene and Naushad Ali at Lakme Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2018. While Indigene made use of exquisite ikat from Odisha in their kurtas, khalatas and elaborate chappans – typical of Central Asia, Ali used a colour palette of greens and browns that reminded him of the Musuri cluster of Tamil Nadu he had worked with. Reworked stripes, checks and ikat characterised the material of his minimal, contemporary designs. Three's layered, geometric and timeless designs using handcrafted material from Saidanpur in Bihar are meant to be a part of the wardrobe, irrespective of fads and seasonal fashions – a true doffing of the hat towards the durability aspect of sustainability.

The journey, though fulfilling, has not been an easy one for Manzar and his team. "The weavers, used to being treated as little-paid labourers, had stopped having any faith in their own artistry. It was difficult to change that mindset," recalls Manzar, adding that he also found it difficult to encourage weavers to learn digital software and computer skills during vital time that they would rather devote to their work. Manzar also found it challenging to convince vendors and merchants to treat the weavers as skilled equals.

"Logistically, we had to figure out a way to digitise very remote areas. Electricity a scarce in many of these places, so installing WiFi centres was not easy," adds Manzar.

While power back-ups and inverters go a long way towards ensuring a steady trickle of electricity, sometimes even charging the inverters is a tricky feat. In such circumstances, the centre stays open well into night. Trainers also carry laptops and chargers on their bikes to the houses for women, who aren't as comfortable coming to the centre.

Despite the many roadblocks, the effect of digitisation in these areas has been nothing short of remarkable. Chanderi, the first of the 10 clusters, has evolved from a Rs 60 crore industry to a Rs 150 crore one and have archived over 10,000 designs. Social media and e-commerce portals have also helped the youth in these villages directly market their products online. Household incomes have also increased by 30 per cent.

"Now that we have got the kind of exposure that Lakme Fashion Week could give us, we are going to continue collaborating with the weavers to create contemporary clothing with age-old weaving techniques and are planning to create more opportunities for shows," says Manzar, adding that two showrooms in Puducherry and Delhi are also in the works.