Over the past century, Indian farmers wear compelled to
abandon desi cotton varieties, which had evolved over thousands of years to
resist local pests and whitstand droughts, in favour of the long- stapled
American cotton, which was more suited to machine processing and hence in
greater demand. Consequently, almost all the cotton grown today is derived from
American varieties. However, the American cotton requires irrigation and is
vulnerable to pests. As a result, farmers are caught in the trap of high input
costs, with no safety net if the crop fails.
At the order end of the loop, handloom weavers get yarn in
hank from only at the whim of the spinning mills, so there are often unexplained
shortages of particular counts. The huge variety of handloom fabrics, with each
region contributing its particular weaves, is great advantage in the market;
and precisely this diversity is lost when handlooms everywhere have to use the
same mill-spun yarn.
The Malkha
Alternative
The situation described above raises the question: could we
bypass large-scale mill-spinning and view the huge number of small cotton
farmers and handloom weavers as great potential strength of our rural economy ?
After all, their presence offers the basic building blocks for a widespread,
sustainable, decentralised, ecologically sensible rural industry with all the
benefits of dispersed production and distributed returns.
This thought process led to the emergence of malkha with the
maxim "local production for local use". As a first step, malkha
excluded baling and unbaling, processes that not only damage the cotton fibre,
but also engender centralisation of spinning and sever the link between cotton
farmers and handloom weavers. This facilitated the use of small- scale pre-
spinning machinery, which could be set up near farmers' fields and handloom
weaving centers.
All fabrics produced by this setup are handwoven. At
present, malkha uses cotton grown by local farmers. As the farmers shift to
organic cultivation, hopefully of the desi cotton varieties in future, malkha
will move along with them. In the long run, the malkha process aims to create
small groups of producers, confident of their control of the production cycle,
understanding and practicing collective working and collective ownership. At
that juncture, the producers should not only be able to appreciate all the
facets of economic activity raw material, means of production, market, finance-
but also to adapt them to their own needs.
