BANGALORE: Textiles Ministry inked a pact with homegrown e-retailing major Flipkart to provide an online marketing platform to handloom weavers across the country, an initiative to boost the handloom sector, empower the weavers and uplift manufacturing in the country.

Responding to queries raised on choosing a particular company for the agreement, Textiles Secretary S K Panda said: “What we are starting now is only on a pilot basis, nobody is compelled to sell only to a particular agency. Our aim is to eliminate middlemen, assist the master weaver… After a period of 3 to 6 months we will go for bidding”. Textiles Minister Santosh Gangwar, who was present on the occasion, emphasised that the focus of this association should be to help weavers and weaver entrepreneurs to produce products in tune with the buyer requirements and grow them significantly so that they may become manufacturers not only at a local but also at a national level.

Through this exclusive agreement, Flipkart will provide weavers in India an online marketing platform, infrastructural support in data analytics and customer acquisition to help them get remunerative prices for their products and scale up their business. ”This (MoU) will help us reach out to thousands of weavers across India… Through this initiative we are giving a direct platform to the weavers to reach out to the end-customers. There will be no middlemen. The customer will get access to variety of products across India. Flipkart will help them (weavers) to list on the marketplace,” Ankit Nagori, Vice President-Marketplace at Flipkart told PTI.