Kalimpong, Oct. 17: The carding brush manufacturing industry is dying a slow death here due to lack of demand.

Made of wood, leather and wire, carding brushes are used to manually clean and soften sheep wool with which carpets are woven. Kalimpong is the only place in India where carding brushes are made. Manufacturing of these brushes began here in the 50s, when the trade route to Tibet through Kalimpong (Jelep-la) was still open.

?Someone in the mid 50s brought one brush manufacturing machine from Germany. Afterwards, some local blacksmiths made replicas of it and people started manufacturing the brushes,? said 33-year-old Dinesh Goyal, the proprietor of Kaylash Carding Brush, which has been closed for about three years now.

?There were four manufacturing units here and all did good business with Tibet,? Goyal said. There are only two such units (one of them in picture by Chinlop Fudong Lepcha) now.

According to Goyal, the decline in the carpet industry in Nepal was a contributing factor to the closure of his production unit, though till the 80s orders did come from places like Ladakh in Himachal Pradesh and Bhutan.

Bijay Shah Shankar, the proprietor of Shankar Carding Brush, which makes about 500 to 600 brushes per month, said: ?Being the only mass scale production unit here, we still get a fair amount of business from Nepal.?

Shankar?s unit has managed to fight off competition from various quarters. ?In Nepal, they had even tried to mechanically clean and soften the wool, but they were not successful,? said Shankar.

Goyal, however, believes that the survival of the industry depends on the reopening of Jelep-la. ?Else, the industry will not survive,? he said.