Tantuja bags national award for best designs
The Union Ministry of Textile’s award for the best designs for handloom products in the country for the year 2018 was announced recently, which was won by the state government-run weavers’ cooperative Tantuja.
Once again, Tantuja has won a national award. The Union Ministry of Textiles recently announced that the award for 2018 in the ‘Design Development of Handloom Product’ category had gone to the state government-helmed weavers’ cooperative.
Individually, Biren Basak, a weaver from Nadia, won the award in the same category.
Tantuja, as well as many weavers associated with it, have won various awards in the recent past, following the cooperative’s revival under the Trinamool Congress-led government out of its doomed fate under the Left Front government. Now it has bagged the award for design as well.
Incorporating modern designs in the handloom products has been an essential component of the organisation’s revival. Following the initiative of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in 2015, a modern design centre named State Design Centre was established on the sixth floor of Tantuja Bhawan.
After the Trinamool Congress came to power in 2011, seeing its huge potential as an organisation and as a harbinger of good times for the weavers of Bengal, Mamata Banerjee made the revival of Tantuja one of her government’s priorities.
The organisation first saw profit in financial year (FY) 2013-14. In FY 2020-21, it earned Rs 2 crore just by selling online (it had made tie-ups with Flipkart and Amazon a few years back).
Tantuja had won the National Award for Marketing of Handloom Products for the year 2015-16, which was given out in August 2016.
In September 2016, it received the prestigious Images Retail Award in Mumbai, being acknowledged as the “best turnaround story” by the country’s biggest retail forum, Indian Retail Forum (IRF), for the innovative marketing and retailing strategies that helped it see profits for three years in a row (2013-14 to 2015-16), after being perpetually a loss-making company for 25 years. The IRF lauded “the Bengal government’s efforts in turning Tantuja into a success story”.
In 2020, Tantuja won another prestigious award, a Skoch Platinum Award for helping the state government in its fight against COVID-19 by manufacturing lakhs of masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) kits at very short notice. Again, it was the chief minister’s initiative which led to Tantuja’s getting involved in this.
