By TIOL News Services

NEW DELHI, AUG 26, 2014: MINISTRY of Textiles yesterday announced that Ministry through DC (Handlooms) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Flipkart India Pvt. Ltd. to provide an online marketing platform to handloom weavers to boost the handloom sector, empower the weavers and boost manufacturing in the country.

Through this exclusive agreement, Flipkart will provide weavers in India online marketing platform, infrastructural support in data analytics and customer acquisition to help them get remunerative prices for their products and scale up their business.

Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, through the office of the Development Commissioner for Handlooms, is continuously striving to develop a strong, competitive and vibrant handloom sector to provide sustainable employment to handloom weavers. The Ministry had adopted a focused, flexible and holistic approach to promote and facilitate the continuous overall growth and development of the handloom industry through formulating, implementing, monitoring and reviewing of handloom policies, programmes and schemes; to support the handloom sector at large in upgrading skill knowledge, market infrastructure, living conditions etc.

For marketing support, the Ministry of Textiles has taken many initiatives from time to time such as organization of domestic marketing events, participation in international fairs and buyer-seller meets etc. However, in the present scenario of online marketing and net savvy consumers, the need has been felt to provide an online marketing platform to handloom weavers so that exquisite handloom products of remote villages is made available to discerning buyers.

With this objective, Ministry of Textiles, through Development Commissioner for handlooms signed an MOU with Flipkart, a leading online market service provider.

This kind of a coordinated effort has been planned and executed for the first time with Flipkart for handloom weavers. It will bridge the missing linkages of market intelligence, market access and logistics and help the Indian weavers in getting remunerative prices for their products. Flipkart will provide an online marketplace for sale of products of the weavers / master craftsmen/ national awardees/ state level awardees and the others as advised by Development Commissioner for Handlooms. Towards this end, they will go to the doorsteps of the above said since they do not have the brand or the financial wherewithal to have a store, not even in their village, leave aside in a town, nor the means to travel to market their products. Flipkart or their business partners will also have a collection center to collect their products.

The weavers will sell their products under their brand name and evolve as entrepreneurs selling their products directly to buyers across the country without stepping out of their workplace.

Flipkart, with its access to the largest customer base in the country, aims to help weavers make optimal use of the available data to guide entrepreneurs and artisans on areas such as deciding on the right selling price, payment automation, proper packaging, transportation, brand building etc.

The DATA analytics and market intelligence provided by Flipkart will help the weavers focus only on producing better saleable product ranges. This in turn will help them plan their production and inventory and expand their business, thus revolutionizing manufacturing in rural India and encourage entrepreneurship.