Ahmedabad, Jan 3 (PTI) The Quality Council of India (QCI) and Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) on Wednesday signed an initial pact to enhance quality of the latter's products, train artisans and introduce 'Made in India' label for khadi.
The MoU was signed at Kochrab Ashram, established by Mahatma Gandhi, here in the presence of QCI chairperson Jaxay Shah and KVIC chairperson Manoj Kumar.
Speaking on the occasion, Shah said the agreement between the two entities is aimed at enhancing the overall quality of the khadi ecosystem, ensuring that khadi retains its timeless appeal and becomes a global symbol of quality and sustainability.
"QCI will extend its support to KVIC by enhancing the quality of KVIC products through various interventions including third party assessment framework, accreditation and quality check of khadi products. We will also help in promoting khadi products, both domestically and internationally," Shah said in his address.
He informed the audience that QCI's product assessment mechanism is approved by 140 countries.
"We will try to remove middlemen from the ecosystem so that the artisans get a fair price for their products. Our efforts will be to take the Made In India khadi products on the world map. Apart from assessing khadi manufacturing process and quality of supply chain, we will also engage in skilling and capacity building of artisans to improve the quality of khadi products," Shah said.
He added that QCI will also provide guidance to KVIC about branding, marketing and selling their products on e-commerce platforms. In addition to monitoring and hand-holding, QCI will also help KVIC to introduce the 'Made in India' label for khadi.
On the occasion, Manoj Kumar described khadi as India's symbol of self-reliance as well as sustainability. He added that the industry witnessed a phenomenal growth in production in the last few years with a growth of 268 per cent from 2013-14 to 2022-23.
"KVIC's revenue was only Rs 30,000 crore to Rs 35,000 crore in 2013-14. Today, our sales stand at Rs 1.35 lakh crore. We have gained an additional revenue of Rs 1 lakh crore during the last nine years. This additional income of Rs 1 lakh crore has contributed a lot in lifting crores of people out of poverty. This robust growth translated into the creation of 9.54 lakh jobs in FY23 alone," Kumar said in his address.
"We need to make the youth understand the importance of khadi. With the intervention of QCI, our khadi products will scale new heights globally. Khadi is also 'green' because in comparison to other fabrics, it uses very less water during production. I am confident that quality standards to be set by QCI will help us in increasing exports of khadi products," he said.