How India Plans to Market Handloom Products
An agreement has been signed between the Development Commissioner (Handlooms), Ministry of Textiles, Government of India and NDTV Ethnic Retail Ltd. for popularizing India Handloom textiles as a fashionable product for youth.
The three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on 10th May, 2016 at Udyog Bhawan.
The joint endeavour will endorse and launch a project, Indianroots Fashion Accelerator (IFA), a project by NDTV, to support fresh talent and to support new and innovative ventures in fashion industry. Government will support the project with incubation and production support.
India Handloom Brand will also provide an interface where fashion professionals will be able to accesses facilities such as Weavers Service Centres and handloom clusters. The initiative will connect fashion designers with Handloom sector in an organized manner.
“We see this partnership as a welcome move, it will collaboratively take forward the vision of India Handloom and the “Make In India” vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The initiative would help us in our objective of promoting traditional handwoven products of India,” said Alok Kumar, Development Commissioner (Handlooms).
The India Handloom Brand was launched by Narendra Modi on 7th August, 2015, the first National Handloom Day, to endorse the quality of handloom products in terms of raw material, processing, embellishment, weaving, design and other parameters, besides social and environment compliance.
The main objective is to promote the production of quality products with new designs for winning the trust and confidence of customers by giving particular attention to defect free, hand woven, authentic niche products with zero defect and zero impact on environment.
As on 1st April, 2016, 170 handloom producing agencies / enterprises have been given registration under the brand, in 41 product categories. Several e-commerce platforms and leading retail stores have been engaged for marketing of India Handloom branded products.
Photo courtesy: India Handloom Brand
