Patna: Chief minister Nitish Kumar's scheme to buy bed sheets to help weavers is the latest example of how programmes fizzle out on the ground in Bihar.
Last year, Nitish improvised the scheme to buy "satrangi" bedsheets (called so for their seven colours) for government hospitals and primary health centres from weavers to provide an impetus to the handloom sector and secure livelihoods. Hundreds of Bihar's weavers returned home from Surat, Gujarat, eager to work and be around their families.
But a year on, the weavers' cooperatives are waiting for purchase orders from the health department for the current fiscal. Naquib Ahmad, chairman of BISHCOTEX, a union of weavers' cooperatives in Bihar, said: "The government signed an agreement in 2016 for supply of satrangi bed sheets to hospitals for three consecutive years. Our weavers got orders to supply 2.57 lakh bed sheets in the 201617 financial year and they met it. We haven't got any supply orders for the current financial year."
Around 2,200 weavers, spread across Patna, Nalanda, Siwan, West Champaran, Bhagalpur, Banka and Madhubani districts, are engaged in weaving the seven-coloured bed sheets on their looms. Many of them had left their traditional trade and started working in the unorganised sector only to make a comeback to handlooms. They are still producing the bed sheets in anticipation of the supply order. "We have written to the health department and met its officials several times since April, requesting them to place the order for bed sheets for the current financial year, but nothing has happened so far," Naquib said, adding that the weavers earn Rs 60 per bed sheet and make around eight or nine bed sheets a day.
Sources in the government said bulk orders for these bed sheets had purportedly stopped at the time RJD chief Lalu Prasad's eldest son Tej Pratap Yadav was at the helm of the health department, and there was friction between the JDU and the RJD.
The industries department - which has to take care of the handloom sector - has now created a buffer fund of Rs 2 crore. Rs 50 lakh has been provided as the first instalment to BISHCOTEX to pay the weavers wages till they receive supply orders for the bed sheets from the health department.