Silk Sulk

Ramanagara became famous in the 1970s when the blockbuster Sholay was shot there.

- Naandika Tripathi

As you enter the town, about 50 km from the southwest of Bengaluru, a huge sign greets you: “Welcome to Silk City, Ramanagara”. Almost half of India’s raw silk production takes place here, with Karnataka accounting for 60 percent of the total production. This is not all. Asia’s largest silk cocoon market is in Ramanagara where sericulture farmers from all over India sell their cocoons in the Government Cocoon Market. To extend support to the farmers and silk reelers, this market works 363 days a year except on January 26 and August 15. India is the second largest producer of silk in the world after China.

The market at Ramanagara is essentially a huge hall, with hundreds of large metal trays piled with cocoons. This is where farmers sell their cocoons to silk reelers, who produce raw silk from these cocoons. The silk reelers stop at each tray to inspect the cocoons and bid on them using a mobile phone app built for e-auctioning of the cocoons. Two types of cocoons are sold in this market: Cross-breed and bivoltine.

For the past few months, however, the farmers have been unable to fetch desirable prices for their cocoons. The average price of cross-breed silk and bivoltine silk cocoons, which used to be 380 and 490 respectively till September 2018, has dropped to 280 and 350. “We used to get good prices for our cocoons but now the prices have gone down so much that we incur a loss. I have to transport my cocoons from Maharashtra to Karnataka, which involves a lot of expenses. To sell all our produce we have to compromise on the price out to 4,800 per kg. Local raw silk is available for 4,600 per kg. The price of raw silk in India depends on the selling price of Chinese silk and it varies accordingly.