When India lifted restrictions on international silk imports in 2001, inexpensive textiles from China (made on power-looms rather than Indian handlooms) flooded the Indian silk market. In the textile industry—after agriculture, the country’s largest economic sector—thirty-eight million handloom weavers found themselves in a downward-spiraling, competitive price market. In many cases, declining incomes meant emaciation, starvation, and suicide for the weavers and their families.

Ashoka Fellow Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi, the founding director of People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), considers death by starvation a violation of the basic right to life. According to Dr. Lenin, at the root of the problem are injustices in the name of caste. In order to uncover undiscovered cases of weavers in distress, he cultivated relationships with local media and created the organization Boonkar – Dastkar Adhikar Manch, composed of 25,000 weavers and volunteers. The organization gives an institutional voice to individual weavers in distress and further advocates for the rights of weavers and craftsmen in India.  

Working at the intersection of social tradition, political inefficiency, and economic hardship, Dr. Lenin is fighting against inequality and protecting human rights in rural India. Read more about the crisis here.

Jane Abbottsmith, Fellowship Associate