Haritha S Sundar
The 44 year old, Chintakindi Mallesham, was born in a weaver’s family in the Sharjipettu village, of Andhra Pradesh. He quit his studies at Standard VI and started helping his mother in weaving. In weaving Pochampalli tradition of silk sarees, the silk thread has to be spread on a pattern for subsequent drawing of designs and thereafter for tying and dyeing. The process is conventionally done manually by ladies of weaver families and it takes almost five laborious hours for one saree. In a day a lady could only do for two sarees which took away ten hours of daylight. When his mother started suffering from heavy back pain, due to the manual processing, he began to think of making a machine to make the process simpler and easy.
After many attempts, finally, in 1999 February, he succeeded and dedicated his work in the name of his mother and named it ‘Laxmi ASU machine’. Using the machine, one could weave 6 sarees per day and it had better finishing than those made by hand. More than ten thousand families rely on weaving in the villages of Nalgonda and Warangal. Today women start weaving industries alone and earn more than thousand rupees per day and provide quality education to their off springs. He also made it to the Forbes’ list of seven most powerful rural Indian entrepreneurs and received the Amazing Indians Award 2016 at the hands of the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Let Padma Award be safe with those who know the pain and suffering of the deprived.
Key Contribution 😕 Introduction of Laxmi ASU machine into Handloom industry
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