Issues

Ramanagaram’s silk reelers face starvation as import of cheaper Chinese silk renders them jobless.

The familiar whirl of silk reeling units is now less heard in Ramanagaram, the town of silk reelers, situated some 45 kilometres south of Bangalore. The narrow streets in the Naalbandwadi mohalla has just one single pile of firewood. Till a few years ago, there used to be at least 30 such piles. Of the dozens of hovel workshops, the only single one emits the whirl of the wheels. Riyaz Ahmed, the owner of the lone functioning unit, operates the business with just about eight hot basins.
‘We barely eke out a livelihood with these few machines’, says Riyaz. ‘Our unit used to employ 15 workers, but now we are left with only eight workers’ adds Riyaz.

But Riyaz’s plight is not unique. Hundreds of filature units of Ramanagram are either lying defunct or have wound up operation for good. Ever since the trade tariff barriers were lifted on import trade, Chinese silk has made a foray into the Indian market in a major way thereby making Ramanagram’s silk filature units redundant.

Plight of those who have lost their livelihood is pathetic. Rafi Ahmed Khan has slipped deep into debts. The Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation disconnected his power connection a few months ago. Rafi had to admit his three kids into Government Urdu schools as he could not afford expensive English medium schools. His wife complained that they had been living in a house that has a look of a haunted house as power supply has been severed. With most families being incapable of affording English medium education, children are being admitted to Urdu schools. The town had the reputation of producing the best results in the Bangalore Rural district. Chinese silk yarn is now available for as little as Rs. 1000 a kg, while the silk yarn produced at Ramanagram, Sidlaghatta, Channapatna in Karnataka does not cost anything below Rs. 1150. Besides, the Chinese silk is better in quality.

Most of the filature units were set up in Ramanagram in 1957-58. The area around these towns was traditionally known for mulberry cultivation. Silkworms feed over mulberry leaves and produce silk through their sputum. The cocoons are sold in the Ramanagram market by the ryots who are mostly villagers. The residents of Ramanagram had therefore been engaged in reeling and twisting of silk yarn which involves boiling the cocoons in hot basin. The spinning wheels then draw out the yarn from cocoon which is then formed into reels and sold in the market for textile manufacturing. Till a decade ago, there were nearly 3,500 licence holders for Filature as well as Dupion units here.
Mohammad Aslam had a unit comprising 10 hot basins. He went out of business five years ago and now runs a small grocery store which does not suffice for his needs and has approached an NGO in Bangalore for funding his son’s BE course. While Aslam may just be surviving, Syed Anwar has to daily shuttle between nearby Bangalore and Ramanagram for manual labour. According to a rough estimate, nearly 2000 persons displaced from silk units now travel everyday to Bangalore for jobs leading to considerable social dislocation. These include persons who once employed as many as 35 persons in their units.

But Abbas Shariff devised a new avenue for his livelihood. He has hit upon the idea of setting up a scrap go-down where he collects the rusting hot basins, spinning wheels and machinery from twisting units and sells them at the price of scrap iron. Till 2002, his reeling and twisting unit employed 27 workers. Shariff told Islamic Voice, it now seems more profitable to sell the scrap iron while sorting out churners, drum, bolts and nuts from a heap of rusted metal just then dumped by a lorry.

Hidayatullah, a youth who tends a four-acre coconut farm in the vicinity of the town and had been a witness to steady economic decline, says as many as 150 houses are up for sale in the town. The banks no longer extend loans where houses are offered in collateral guarantee.
Says Ziaullah, a former Town Municipality chairman and a silk reeler, in 1998 the Government announced waiving of interest accumulated on bank loans till 1994 but did nothing to release the amount to the bank. Consequently nearly 200 such reelers are still found in the defaulters lists of banks. Similarly, the Government has not released Backward area subsidy to the units. Ziaullah says the outstanding dues on this score come to the tune of Rs. 2 crore.

But the story is not complete without the other side of the accounts. Even as smaller units have closed one by one, larger units with as many as 200 hot basins still manage to do business. Closer scrutiny reveals that over the years, the Muslims of Ramanagaram failed to comprehend the dynamics of the new market which needed periodical modernization of machinery and improvement of quality. Even as traditional families split and businesses followed suit, overheads began to rise over a unit of produced silk. This was quite in contrast to the market dynamics which urged enlargement of unit for minimising the overheads.