Textiles Ministry partners to market handloom online

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Mar 6, 2018

On March 5, the Union Government’s Textiles Ministry informed Parliament that a total of 21 e-commerce companies have been engaged to market handloom textiles on their respective platforms.

The Minister of State for Textiles, Ajay Tamta, wrote a written note to the Rajya Sabha, Council of States (the Upper House of Parliament) stating that a policy framework has been created by the Textiles Ministry to promote handloom textiles online. Under the framework, any interested e-commerce platform that has a good track record can participate and, as part of participation, the platform will engage in special marketing campaigns to promote handloom textiles such as Khadi. The aim is to greatly expand the handloom customer through tapping into the large customer bases of India’s e-commerce giants.

Minister Tamta’s letter read: "So far, this ministry has engaged 21 e-commerce entities for online marketing of handloom products." Tamta also mentioned that 9.54 crore rupees (approximately 1.4 million US dollars) worth of handloom sales had been generated by e-commerce portals as of December 31 2017. This seems promising as the Ministry is continuing to expand its network of stores to promote handloom through creating memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with both online and offline retailers.

The Ministry of Textiles has been working to promote handloom textiles as part of the Union Government’s “Make in India” campaign that aims to increase domestic production in all areas. The sustainable and traditional handloom textile Khadi has been specially promoted throughout and has also been made exempt from the Goods and Services Tax (GST) that replaced the old Value Added Tax (VAT) system in July last year.