India: Day Five

On Thursday, we spent the day learning about silk production at R.A. Silks.  From itty-bitty worm to spun silk thread, they walked us through the whole process.

R.A. Silks works with hundreds of small scale silk worm farmers to raise silk worms.  The silk worms start off quite tiny, as you may see above, and are fed mulberry leaves for the beginning of their life as they grow.

R.A. Silks has a field of mulberry bushes at their facility to feed the worms.  You can see the leaves behind me in the picture above.

Next, the worms form their cocoons and then are sold by the kilogram to R.A. Silks. The cocoons are evaluated for their amount of yield before being transferred to the main building.

Here, a group of women sorted the cocoons by useable versus not. The bad cocoons were larger indicating there was two pupae inside and those particular cocoons cannot be used. The bad cocoons are then shipped to China to make quilt batting. Next, the useable cocoons are put through a hot drying process, which kills the pupae, and then soaked in water to prepare for reeling. Reeling is the main step in producing silk yarns where the cocoons are subjected to heat and pressure which helps separate the silk yarns. Now that the cocoons have begun to separate, the silk is spun onto small spindles before being transferred to large bundles and packaged.

I most enjoyed hearing about how R.A. Silks has a closed loop production process.  They recycle the water that they use to boil and process the silk cocoons to water their mulberry trees, and then the pupas that were in the cocoons are dried and sold for fish food.

Finally, it was amazing to hear that their product is distributed to Pochampally, among others.  This meant that we had now seen the silk produced, from worm to ready-to-wear apparel, at all steps.

We departed R.A. Silks and returned to our hotel.  A group of us decided to venture to Charminar, a monument built in the 1500s.  "Char" means "four" in Hindi, and refers to the four minarets of the monument.  A bazaar has grown out around the popular location.

We ended our night with a rickshaw ride back to our hotel!  Thanks for another great day, India!