It has been a wonderful and enriching experience for all of us over the past 2 weeks road-tripping in the villages of Pochampally in Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh. We went there to primarily understand the hardships faced by the weaving community. Even though Pochampally is a world renowned brand and it does millions of business both in the domestic and foreign markets, the weavers are facing so many problems and are not able to meet their daily expenses. We wanted to find out the reason for this and try to solve some of the issues.

We were staying in the brand-new tourist center in Pochampally which was constructed by Ministry of Tourism. We spoke to weavers working under master weavers, weavers working in the cooperative society, weavers working for private shop owners and weavers working in the handloom park, but all of them face almost similar problems. They are severely underpaid and all the profits are taken by the middle men. Rising raw material costs, copying of the designs by power looms, highly polluted water, false promises by the govt., corruption at various levels add to their existing woes. Many weavers told us that they are not encouraging their children to enter into this profession. We were awestruck by this as if this continues the fine art of Pochampally ikkat weaving is going to extinguish in a decade.

We will be covering each of these issues in detail in the subsequent blog posts and also write about our individual experiences and learningrquote s from the road trip. We will be uploading few photos on flickr and we are also making few documentary videos about Pochampally and the issues grappling the weavers.

We are grateful to the Grassroutes team for providing us an opportunity to visit Pochampally and also Akshara for making sure that our stay at Pochampally is comfortable.

Meanwhile follow us on twitter to know the latest updates about videos, photos and blog posts about our road trip.