Ministry of Textiles
Sericulture Industry
I. INTRODUCTION
Sericulture is a labour-intensive industry in all its phases, namely, cultivation of silkworm food plants, silkworm rearing, silk reeling, and other post-cocoon processes such as twisting, dyeing, weaving, printing and finishing. It provides employment to approximately 68.17 lakhs persons, most of them being small and marginal farmers, or tiny & household industry mainly in the hand reeling and hand weaving sections. Cultivation of sericulture is not very widespread being practiced regularly in contiguous districts in the three southern States of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu; in the North Eastern Region(NER); in the tribal areas of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa; and in Jammu & Kashmir and West Bengal. The cocoons and silk processing industry has traditionally existed in clusters in areas not necessarily coinciding with the sericulture areas in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Bihar. Reeling of silk is more widespread, with different clusters/traditionally producing distinctive designs and weavers, mainly in saris.
India has the distinction of cultivating all the four commercially known varieties of silk, namely, Mulberry, Tasar, Eri and Muga.
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