PM announces slew of measures to revitalise handloom sector

New Delhi, June 28 (UNI) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today offered succour to the impoverished weavers and made a slew of suggestions for revitalising the sagging handloom sector, including offering them a lower interest rate and restructuring the debt of handloom co-operatives as well as individual weavers.

Launching the 'Handloom Mark" here, the Prime Minister also announced the setting up of 230 yarn depots for providing easy access to the commodity for all handloom clusters with more than 1,000 looms and made out a case for extending technolgy upgradation fund scheme to this sector.

He has asked Finance Minister P Chidambaram to consider the feasibility of extending the low interest facility provided for farming community loans at 7 per cent to handloom weavers as well.

Dr Singh said he had asked the Textile and Finance Ministers to look at the problem of debt which is afflicting handloom cooperatives so that this can be rescheduled or cooperatives recapitalised in a manner similar to that done for cooperative banks through the Vaidyanathan Committee.

''I am hopeful we will resolve this problem in the next three months,'' he said and acknowledged that high cost of credit and debt overhang as serious constraints and underscored the need to address these problems on ''a priority basis'', he said.

Reiterating the Government's commitment to address the problems of weavers, the Prime Minister announced that 230 new Yarn Depots will be opened soon to provide easy access to yarn to all clusters with more than a thousand looms. He also announced that Government will cover another 100 clusters in this year under the Integrated Handloom Cluster Development Scheme.

The event, organised at Vigyan Bhawan, was also addressed by Union Minister of Textiles Shankersinh Vaghela and Minister of State for Textiles E V K S Elangovan.

The Handloom Mark would help consumers distinguish between genuine hand woven fabric and power loom and machine-made fabric and that it would help individual weavers, weavers cooperative societies, master weavers, retailers and exporters.

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