Family members of a silk weaver give final touch to fibres at Bhagalpur. Picture by Ashutosh Kumar

Bhagalpur, Nov. 11: The age-old silk market in Bhagalpur is under pressure from China. The threat here is not from the army of the communist country. The price hike of tassar yarn imported from China is the challenge.

The silk industry here procures about 80 per cent of tassar yarn, the raw material used for making silk cloths, from China. Sources said the price of Chinese tassar has shot up to Rs 3,300 per kg from Rs 1,700 in October last year.

“The price hike has not happed all of a sudden. We have been bearing with hike of Rs 100 or even Rs 200 per kg almost every month. We will incur heavy loss now,” said Md Hamid, a cloth manufacturer.

He pointed out that customers were not willing to buy the finished products on higher rate. “But we are bound to charge extra because of our increased investment in the raw material,” he said.

Driving his point home, Hamid said: “We are forced to charge Rs 2,600 for a silk dupatta weighing 1kg now. Its price was Rs 1,400 last year. The buyers are obviously miffed at such a sharp rise in prices.”

The traditional and famous silk cloth-weaving industry here suffered a big blow in the wake of the 1989 Bhagalpur riots. The people engaged in producing tassar locally were either killed or deserted the city. As a result, Bhagalpur silk industry became dependent on artificially made tassar yarns smuggled in through China. The government legalised the import of China tassar in Bhagalpur in 1990s, paving the way for the import of the raw material to cater to the need of the industry.

With the local producers of tassar almost vanishing, China virtually started enjoying a monopoly on tassar yarn production. Traders said the century-old Bhagalpaur silk industry was now heavily dependent on the import of the raw material from China.

“By raising the price of the raw material, China is almost in the process of breaking the backbone of the industry here,” said Pranesh Roy, another exporter of the finished products of silk.

Bhagalpur silk industry requires 15,000 to 18,000kg of tassar yarns every month.

A silk exporter, Dipak Bhubaniya, said the import of silk yarn from China had gone down to about 12,000 to 14,000kg per month because the Bhagalpur traders were afraid of making big investment in the business when the customers were not ready to buy the finished products at the raised price.

The hike in the price of imported tassar yarns is having cascading effect on the prices of finished products. A meter of silk cloth made of 60 gram of yarns now costs Rs 180 to Rs 190 against Rs 140 last year. Tassar silk saris, which were available for Rs 700 last year, are now selling at Rs 1,300. There are 25,000 silk weavers in Bhagalpur. There is a high demand for their tassar silk products in foreign markets.

“I have got huge orders from Canada and Germany but I cannot take them all because of the rise in the price of silk yarns,” said Bikash Choudhury, a silk cloth manufacturer.