Spinning

Bikaner’s Cooperative Spinning Mills: The Thread Connecting Desert Farmers to Global Textile Markets

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Bikaner's Cooperative Spinning Mills: The Thread Connecting Desert Farmers to Global Textile Markets

In the dusty outskirts of Bikaner district, a shepherd named Bhoma Ram shears wool from his flock of 120 Magra sheep every winter — and for decades, middlemen paid him barely ₹15-20 per kilogram for it. That changed when a cooperative spinning mill offered him ₹45 per kilogram, nearly triple the rate, and suddenly the … Read more

How Tamil Nadu’s Cooperative Spinning Mills Created an Entire Industrial Town in Coimbatore

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How Tamil Nadu's Cooperative Spinning Mills Created an Entire Industrial Town in Coimbatore

On a damp morning in Singanallur, a suburb that bleeds into Coimbatore’s sprawling industrial belt, I watched Ramasamy Gounder, a 72-year-old retired mill worker, point at a row of concrete buildings stretching along the Noyyal River. “Every one of those structures,” he told a local reporter in 2023, “was built with money that belonged to … Read more