KVIC sees Khadi production share of total textile mill production double in last five years

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Jun 19, 2019

The Khadi and Village Industries Commission has seen the production of Khadi textiles double its share of India’s total textile mill production from 4.23 percent to 8.49 percent over the last five years. 

"It is encouraging for us that rise in share of Khadi production in the textiles sector in the last five years has gone from 4.23 percent to 8.49 percent, which is more than 200 percent,” KVIC’s chairman Vinai Kumar Saxena said on June 18, as reported by the Press Trust of India.

“While from 1956 to 2013-14, the Khadi sector fabric production could reach the figure of 105.38 million square metres, in the last five years [from financial years 2014-15 to 2018-19] it produced another 65.42 square million metres."

Saxena partly attributed the rise in Khadi production to recently re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s championing of the handloom textile. Modi has linked wearing Khadi to national pride in his rhetoric and supported a number of schemes to promote the weave through the Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises and KVIC.

KVIC has run an increasing number of programmes for artisan weavers since 2015 including distributing 5,600 modern looms to weavers. "We started registration of new Khadi institutions for widening the scope for employment as well as revival of defunct Khadi institutions, consequently rising the artisans number to 4,94,684,” said Saxena.