Digital empowerment centres for weavers to be launched today

Mahbubnagar: As part of Microsoft Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), two digital empowerment centres to help the women weavers develop their skills are all set to be launched in Narayanpet mandal on Wednesday.

District Collector Ronald Rose is expected to launch these centres. These centres will be operated by the Chaintanya Bharati organisation. As part of this, UNDP under Disha project will upskill all women weavers in a variety of activities, including help in learning government schemes, design inputs and garment making.

In fact, this initiative is taken up by Microsoft under its project ReWeave which aims to revive the handloom sector across various clusters in India. The first of these initiatives was launched in 2016 in Telangana and since has been expanded to Andhra Pradesh.

The plan is to eventually expand this initiative across States in India that have large weaver clusters. According to studies by Government of India, there are over 43 lakh weavers in India.

This number, however, does not include the family members involved in the process and also the vast ecosystem that relies on weaving as a source of income. “Our effort aims at making not just rehabilitating the weavers, but also ensuring that the profession becomes self sustaining in the long term,” said the Collector.