Social entrepreneur Kunal Vaid is the Founder & CEO at Resham Sutra. He is also the founder of Dev Nrgee Resource Pvt. Ltd., a company specializing in development of innovative technology for rural livelihoods.
Kunal comes from a humble family background; he was born and brought up in New Delhi. After completing his schooling from St. Xavier’s School, Delhi, Kunal pursued his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Production & Industrial Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering. He has also done MBA from Management Development Institute Gurgaon, as well as completed an online course on Social Business from Global Social Benefit Institute, Santa Clara University (USA).
After completing MBA, Kunal decided to join his family business Needlepointe Textile Products Pvt. Ltd, where he went ahead to work for nearly a decade. Needlepointe had formed an agreement with Jharkhand Government to market the world’s first organic certified silk products from the state. However, as the production was quite slow, in 2011, Kunal decided to visit the villages in Jharkhand in order to understand the reason for the bottlenecks in terms of production. That was his first exposure to the extreme agony and drudgery that rural women had to go through to make Tassar Silk yarn through the process of ‘thigh reeling’. Kunal saw that the women indulged in thigh reeling had got cuts all over their skin and suffered from backaches and joint pains; moreover their work was socially looked down upon.
Pained with this experience, Kunal came back with a strong feeling that something must be done for these rural women to free them from the shameful process of thigh reeling. He strongly believed that in today’s age of advanced technology, there has to be a better way for them to their job! With that in mind, he started working on making a machine that would provide these women better productivity, better quality and free them from the painful and shameful processes of ‘thigh reeling’. While this machine-making initially started out as a personal passion or hobby project for Kunal, it blossomed into the foundation of his enterprise Resham Sutra 5 years later.
Through his enterprise Resham Sutra, Kunal is working dedicatedly towards enabling sustainable silk production for bettering rural livelihoods using renewable energy machines that improve productivity and income.
Resham Sutra
New Delhi headquartered Resham Suta is a for-profit social enterprise that innovates, manufactures and supplies renewable energy based rural livelihood enabling machines. The enterprise has established its dedicated ‘Agri-Silk division’ based out of Rachi (Jharkhand), and has over 40 on-ground technicians working across different states of India.
Founded in 2016, Resham Sutra helps rural silk yarn producers and fabric weavers of our country to install higher productivity yielding machines, which in turn increases their income as well as reduces physical drudgery and mental stress. With an apt motto and tagline – “Making machines that bring happiness”, Resham Sutra has developed a wide range of affordable electric reeling, weaving and spinning machines – most of them powered by solar energy – that vastly contribute towards improving the working conditions and in creating a predictable and dramatically higher income for over 10,000 silk workers in India. Till date, Resham Sutra has commercialized 7 user-friendly machines.
Resham Sutra’s mission and vision are to enable India’s rural entrepreneurs to profitably produce and market a variety of silk and handloom products with the aid of networks and technology. Besides, the enterprise facilitates the creation of sustainable employment in rural areas to reduce poverty and focuses on empowering the rural population — especially women — through a plethora of opportunities of self-employment in reeling, spinning, and weaving. Resham Sutra’s team is working with the belief that there can be an alternative model of growth that does not leave anyone behind. It wants to showcase that all-around rural development can be done sustainably and profitably through innovations in business models, technology, and marketing.
Resham Sutra is focusing its activities with and for the rural beneficiaries in some of the poorest regions in the country; these activities mainly include:
• Silk cocoon rearing with tribals in forest areas of Jharkhand other states
• Silk yarn spinning and reeling with rural women in Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and other states • Handloom weaving with traditional hand weavers in various Eastern and North-Eastern states of India
The key competitive edge of Resham Sutra’s work can be summed up in three major pointers as mentioned below:
• Technology innovations – Resham Sutra has innovated several innovative renewable energy-based machines that help to boost productivity as well as the product quality for silk reelers and handloom weavers, thus improving rural livelihoods. The machines are up to 10 times more energy-efficient and productive as compared to the existing and other available options in the market. Notably, Resham Sutra’s machines run on solar power, thus overcoming the lack of poor or no electricity supply in several rural areas as well as eliminating the recurring costs for energy requirements.
• Integration & Aggregation benefits – Resham Sutra facilitates setting up of integrated farm-to-retail value chains and aggregating rural producers to launch producer-owned companies, which in turn facilitates a better share of product realization for the rural producers and micro-entrepreneurs.
• Marketing innovations – Resham Sutra also works towards setting up of hybrid (online+offline) marketplace, product certifications, better design inputs and backing of strong brand names – all these factors combined improve market access for the partner producers of the enterprise.
Resham Sutra has won the prestigious Ashden Award (UK) for “powering rural businesses” and ISHOW award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It was also chosen as one of the ‘Top 10 start-ups in Agri-Tech’ by the National Start-up Mission, Government of India in 2020.
Socio-Economic Impact: Resham Sutra’s innovations have directly impacted over 12,000 families to date by improving their productivity and income through the enterprise’s machines. With Resham Sutra’s aid, their beneficiaries become self-employed and have a regular source of sustainable income. This is in contrast to the previously existing scenario of the beneficiaries, where they were, at best, daily wage earners with irregular and seasonal jobs.
Also, there’s a major improvement in the quality of work, which changes from being hazardous, low-value outdoor work to dignified and creative indoor work due to Resham Sutra’s interventions. The enterprise encourages and supports holistic lifestyle improvements for the beneficiaries — which include giving them access to better healthcare, education for children, and gadgets like solar lighting.
Environmental Impact: Resham Sutra makes maximum use of renewable and low-impact energy sources. The enterprise’s silk production centres are end-to-end solar-powered, including all of its production machines. The users/beneficiaries are exposed to the utilities of solar power for day-to-day life applications, so they can use it for other applications like lighting and cooking as well. Resham Sutra’s deployed machines – operating on solar power — collectively reduce Green House Gases’ emissions by around 6,000 tons per annum.
Resham Sutra’s products (machines) are sold through its network of on-ground field representatives who also offer sales and service of the products. To this end, the enterprise partners with various NGOs, Government agencies, and rural entrepreneurs across various locations. Since its inception, the enterprise has seen a 50-100 percent year-on-year growth. As more new initiatives are reaching break-even points, the rate of growth of the enterprise is expected to further increase in the coming years.
Additionally, Resham Sutra has set up a number of Rural Experience Centres or RECs in major rural clusters; these Centres provide complete buying support to customers including product demonstrations, test runs, financing support, and after-sales training and technical support. The RECs also support producers in villages to do value-addition of making yarn and fabric within their communities using locally available raw material and further provide support for marketing and sales of the products.
Interestingly, some of the RECs of Resham Sutra is owned and operated entirely by local women. The RECs usually at first train the rural women for 2-4 weeks to make yarn or fabric. Post the training, the women are helped to form Self Help Groups (SHGs); this enables them to get into production activities more sustainably. Thereafter the women are helped to procure machines and raw materials with financial support from Resham Sutra’s partner financial intuitions.
Besides, Resham Sutra is supporting tribal farmers in taking up silk farming. Their support includes bringing eco-friendly techniques, holistic development, and better technology, as well as integrating silk farm-to-retail value chains through effective technology-based and other types of interventions. For instance, Resham Sutra is facilitating the ‘silk farm to retail project’ in the tribal region of Simdega in Jharkhand, where existing returns from land are extremely low and large tracts of land are left uncultivated due non-availability of irrigation facilities. Here, Resham Sutra is promoting mulberry plantation with the tribal farmers — which has the potential to increase their income many-folds.
The enterprise is setting up farming infrastructure with the help of the local administration while promoting and encouraging sustainable Agri-practices and bringing in the latest improvements in silk farming. Currently, over 200 acres of land in Simdega has been planted with mulberry, and additionally, 300 acres is expected to come up in the near future. Simultaneously, women in the community are being trained to make silk yarn and weave fabrics using Resham Sutra’s solar-powered machines. This project aims to stem the migration of the young generation to cities in search of jobs.
In the months and years to come, Resham Sutra, in its communique says, will continue to create sustainable livelihoods for rural poor by providing them healthy farm and non-farm-based employment options — which also leads to diversification of income sources for them and cushioning them from agrarian crisis. As the majority of the enterprise’s beneficiaries are women, Resham Sutra intends to engage with them to create conducive working conditions and empower them economically as well. To achieve this, Resham Sutra will parallel continue to fortify its forward and backward linkages across the rural textile value chain.
Resham Sutra is a part of the ‘Powering Livelihoods’ programme jointly run by Villgro Innovations Foundation and Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).