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We have for ages grown our own cotton and made cotton cloth - cotton textile making has long been India’s biggest industry. But today there is crisis in both cotton farming and in handloom weaving. Farmers are caught in the trap of high input costs, growing only the kind of cotton which spinning mills can use, with no safety-net if the crop fails. Almost all the cotton grown today is derived from American varieties, suited to machine processing because of its longer staple, but which needs irrigation. Traditional Indian varieties on the other hand used to be grown as rain-fed crops, intercropped with pulses. Cotton is sold by the farmers in its raw state, and the price is kept low by the world price which is undercut by huge US subsidies to its own growers.
Handloom weavers get yarn in hank form only at the whim of the spinning mills, so there are often unexplained shortages of particular counts. The mills make high-twist yarn for mechanical weaving, while handlooms can use yarn with less twist which would give the cloth better absorbency & colour holding. The handloom’s great advantage in the market of its huge diversity - each region has its particular weaves - is lost when handlooms everywhere have to use the same mill-spun yarn.
A modern spinning mill has to have at least 1 lakh spindles to be viable, all of which running together generate so much heat that 20,000 litres of water has to be used every day for cooling & humidification. Besides which, the baling & unbaling which are integral parts of conventional spinning add to infrastructural and running costs. These processes damage cotton fibre, diminishing the valuable natural qualities of cotton – elasticity, absorbency, softness, durability.
Could we by-pass mill-spinning and see our large numbers of small cotton farmers and handloom weavers as great potential strengths of our rural economy? Their continued presence offers the basic building blocks for a large-scale, sustainable, decentralized, ecologically sensible rural industry with all the benefits of dispersed production and distributed returns.
The malkha process
The malkha process explores an alternative to the present situation where both farmers and weavers are dependent on spinning mills, a way in which both farmers and weavers could benefit from each other, and in which spinning could also become a rural occupation. It is the missing link in a fully rural cotton textile industry using local raw material and local skills. Not only would it create more employment, the links between farming and local production would strengthen rural society both socially and politically.
Though the malkha process uses the same amount of power per spindle as conventional spinning, it economizes by cutting out baling, unbaling & blow-room. Since the use of electricity is distributed, it would be able to use small-scale alternative power sources in the future. Relatively little investment is needed, compared to the huge capital costs that large-scale industry requires, and capital and investment would be distributed since each part of the activity is of proportionate scale. Relations between each part of the production chain would be one of equals, among a series of independent producers, rather than as now, where the power is disproportionately with the investor of capital.
Making the production process entirely local opens the door to eventual direct relations with the local market. The cloth made in this way is very hard-wearing, making it suitable for rural wear.
Conventional yarn making
To convert cotton into yarn, after ginning [separating the seeds], the fibres of the lint are first aligned and trash – bits of seed coat, leaf, or clumps of green fibre, dirt – removed. The machines involved are the carder, which removes trash, aligns the fibres & converts them into a cohering blanket, called a lap. This is the most important process in the entire textile-making chain: the quality of the yarn is almost entirely decided here. The output of the carder is carded sliver, a loosely twisted rope which on the draw-frame is evened out, and on the fly-frame is drawn down and further twisted. This roving sliver is then spun into the final yarn on ring-frames.
The prevailing cotton processing technology involves pressing of loose lint into high-density bales for ease and cheapness of transportation. Baling uses steam and high pressure. It destroys the natural fibre to fibre separation, which is a pre-requisite for spinning. To undo the effects of baling a long line of costly machinery is needed - the blowroom machinery. The force used in the blowroom to separate the fibres destroys some of the valuable qualities of cotton – absorbency, durability, softness, elasticity. The blowroom, due to its very high capacity, has defined the minimum scale of a spinning mill. Even then, the idle capacity of a blowroom is usually between 40 & 50%. Pressing and baling, as well as the huge number of spindles generating heat for which cooling systems are essential [an average spinning mill needs 20,000 litres of water per day for cooling alone] make spinning mills capital intensive.
Modern machinery needs longer and stronger staple to withstand the increasing rigours of higher-speed processing, but the American cotton that produces the longer staple does not necessarily produce the best cloth. This cotton needs irrigation, but the humidity caused by irrigation increases incidence of pests.
The DCY* technology:
The machines use ginned cotton lint. Pre-spinning consists of a Carder, a Draw-frame & a Fly-frame, which can process about 20 kgs of lint in 8 hours. Rather than the heavy machinery of the conventional process, which works on principles of force, the DCY machines exploit the natural buoyancy of the cotton. They all use micro-processor controls, reducing the need for complicated gears. The machines are made by Vortex Engineering and cost Rs 14 lakhs. Spinning can be done on either 20 12-spindle motorized ambar charkhas, or on a single 240 spindle ring frame, the charkhas bought from a khadi sanstha, the ring-frames second-hand from spinning mills.
The output of one unit can be woven on 26 pit looms or 14 frame looms.
*DCY: Decentralized Cotton Yarn |
