Reviving Khadi in India

The production of Khadi is labour intensive as the weaving has to be done manually. The pure cotton collected from cotton farms is first ginned and bales are made. These bales are then converted into rowings and distributed to different spinning units. In the spinning units, the cotton fibre is manually converted into yarn using charkas.⁴ The yarn is then woven into fabric using handlooms. During the post-independence era, Indian industrialists set up capital intensive textile mills. Due to mass production, these mills could offer fine cloth at lower prices. Synthetic material like polyester was available at a very low price compared to Khadi. Thus despite all policy incentives to popularize Khadi, people bought machine made textiles.

Besides Khadi, KVIC also dealt with other products such as toilet soaps, detergents, honey, pickles, spices, incense sticks, handmade paper, leather, ceramics, and many other agro-based products (Refer Exhibit 1 for product range of KVIC). To keep the spirit of Khadi alive and promote it as a national fabric, KVIC has set up many outlets across India. As a result thousands of spinners, who wove the fabric could sell their output through the vast network of KVIC retail outlets. However, the situation did not improve much. The poor quality of garments sold through the KVIC outlets, resulted in customers' dissatisfaction. People even complained that the quality of Khadi had deteriorated and hence it faded easily...