India's Silk Industry

Think of silk not as one single product but as a family of genuinely distinct materials, each spun by a different species of silkworm feeding on a different plant, with its own texture, sheen and traditional use. Mulberry silk, the smooth, lustrous variety most people picture, comes from silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves, while Tasar, Eri and Muga silks come from wild or semi-domesticated silkworms feeding on other plants entirely, each producing a coarser, more textured fabric with its own regional identity.

India holds a genuinely unusual position globally, it's the world's second-largest silk producer after China, but it's the only major silk-producing country that commercially produces all four of these varieties, mulberry, Tasar, Eri and Muga, the last two genuinely unique to India and parts of neighbouring regions, giving Indian silk a breadth of product diversity no single competing country matches.

Sericulture, the practice of silkworm rearing for silk production, remains a genuinely important rural livelihood across several Indian states, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and the Northeast prominently among them, work that sits at the intersection of agriculture and textile manufacturing, farmers rearing the silkworms and cocoons before the fibre ever reaches a weaving mill.

The Central Silk Board, the government body overseeing this entire sector, focuses on research, quality standards and rural sericulture development specifically because silk's supply chain starts so far upstream, in mulberry cultivation and silkworm rearing, that improving silk fabric quality genuinely requires intervention at the agricultural stage, not just at the weaving and finishing stages closer to the finished textile.