Nuapatna, April 23: Waking up early in the morning and working till midnight on their weaving looms in their homes is not at all a strange thing for hundreds of weavers in Nuapatna village, around 80 kms from Bhubaneswar. This village is known to the people of the state and also to many foreign tourists as a village of weavers where almost all houses have their indoor looms and on an average three people of every family are directly involved in weaving.
However, of late, weavers of this village have been facing several day-to-day hassles, which are affecting their production. The latest problem to plague them is the declining availability of tussar silk in the state. Many weavers are now eying Karnataka and other states producing Mulberry silk for their fabric. The weavers of the village earlier were using tussar silk extensively for their works. The villagers are also sourcing Mulberry silk from Malda in West Bengal. They, however, prefer the Karnataka silk for its superior quality.
“Tussar work is now declining in this village due to several reasons. Prime reasons include, surge in the prices of raw material and lack of accessibility to it. It (tussar silk) is now available at a rate of Rs 4,000/kg, while Mulberry silk is available at Rs 2,200/kg (from Malda, West Bengal) and Rs 3,600/kg (from Karnataka). We are now shifting to Mulberry silk as it is cheaper and easily accessible to us,” said Sarat Patra, a national award-wining weaver from the village. Sarat has been weaving since he was 10 years old.
Sarat also pointed out that the weavers of the village were hardly getting any benefit either from the government or the cooperatives and the NGOs supposed to work for the uplift of the weaving community.
The village with the potential to be part of rural tourism in a big way, meanwhile, is also facing other problems which are preventing it from flourishing. Although the village has direct road links with the state capital and Cuttack, many factors, such as not having a platform from which the weavers may sell their products, are proving a barrier to getting proper attention from the domestic and the foreign tourists.
“Several foreign and domestic tourists often flock to our village to see how clothes are woven from raw fabric. Recently, on April 11, around 20 foreigners visited our village as a part of their rural tourism. They stayed the whole day and minutely observed how much toil and time are required to create our products. However, we were embarrassed as we could not take care of them properly. The village which is often projected as part of rural tourism lacks adequate infrastructure to handle tourists. We do not have any dedicated public toilet, no public information centre, no accommodation for tourists. This is really dampening the prospects of the village, which has potential,” says Surendra Patra, another weaver from the village.
Patra meanwhile, is also disappointed due to the absence of any museum for the weavers at their village. Patra says he and other weavers from the village hardly get any platform to showcase their work to the visitors. Many villagers from the village also believe a dedicated museum in the village could really help them in storing and displaying their creations to the visitors more easily.
Another weaver, Prasant Dutt says, “The village is rich in its potential. Many weavers here toil hard to produce clothes. We often see many visitors flocking to our villages to see the whole process of cloth production and our final work. It would be a good initiative if the government installs solar panels in the village so that we can work in a cleaner environment and the whole village can be projected as a model village.”
Many villagers from the village, however, are buoyed by the response they get from tourists visiting their village. “We are overwhelmed by the response we garner from the visitors. Many a times we get better prices from them as they pay after seeing our work and no middlemen are involved. Unlike them, the showrooms in urban areas often delay our payments and make us suffer. We want the government to take some measures to boost tourism here so that we can benefit from the tourist inflow and sell our products directly from our village,” says a weaver on the condition on anonymity.
Tour operators from the state meanwhile, also complain that the non-availability of basic amenities often thwarts the inflow of visitors. “Rural tourism often gives platform to different stakeholders living in close proximity of the site to flourish. The artists, hotels nearby, shops in close proximity, transport providers and travel agents all get benefitted from this. However, absence of some basic amenities often proves as a hurdle to it. Rural tourism has huge potential, but it needs to be supported by the government,” says Sarat Acharya, founder of Bhubaneswar-based Discover Tour and Travels.
The government meanwhile, is planning to boost tourism at some of the weaving sites across the state by linking it to tourist sites nearby. The Directorate of Textiles and Handlooms recently wrote to the state tourism department to see how the textile and weaving villages of the state could be developed to boost rural tourism.
The Orissa Tourism Policy, which has been in effect now talks about developing local tourist sites for boosting tourism in the state. The policy which was published on April 17, 2013 also talks about developing and projecting local potential sites for tourism. It entrusted the local tourism promotion council and the district tourism promotion council with the duty to identify such potential sites and project and publicise it through several ways. The National Tourism Policy 2002 (in effect till now) also talks about boosting rural tourism to attract tourists from diverse places.
(Published in Orissa Post on April 24)
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