hello and welcome to the Edges Of Earth, my name is Brock. Today I'm with Krishna and he's helping me. We want to show you how the silk industry in India works. It's really intriguing!
The first stop, we are actually here in a room full of worms. Everything behind me, these are silkworms. Trays of silkworms. Thousands, and thousands, and thousands.
I had no idea how big they are. They're huge. They're like the size of my finger. They're big!
a silkworm, apparently from birth, from actual egg birth, to making a cocoon is less than 30 days. Yeah? Yeah. So it's less than 30 days.
These worms are about 15 days old which is huge. I can't believe how big these worms get in such a short time. In just a couple of days, they're going to start producing silk and start making a cocoon.
Do these worms ever bite? Sometimes bite you?
so according to the man, these things don't bite. Which is a good thing. They are huge! If they bit you, it would really hurt!
What is the food choice? it's all the same leaf. Is there a specific type? Only this you should give. Only this particular tree, basically. These leaves. Yeah, you can see behind me, there are tons of them.
I can't believe how much these things eat!
In the morning, they put tons and tons of fresh leaves for them to eat. at 1:30, they change and put a whole new batch of leaves and also in the evening, before they go to bed at night.
yeah, they put a whole new batch of leaves. These things just keep eating, and eating, and eating!
The man says, initially, this little stick is about the size of the worms when they started feeding them.
what worms we should take it here? So basically the grown up worms, right? So how do you find it as grown-up or not?
So there is some yellowish at the downside, it's ready for making cocoons. in two or three days, it becomes a cocoon.
After that, get to the market.
If you use any tube lights, or anything, it doesn't work. so at night if you're using a tube light, super fast, you should switch it off.
amazing, so we just got an idea about how this whole worm operation works, and how they have the cocoons. I'm going to show you the cocoons soon. They don't have any right now.
But we are actually going to go to a market where they are selling all of these cocoons. Let's go. are you ready? Do you know how to get there? Yeah. I'm a superhero. He's a superhero.
and what city are we in? Ramanagara. Okay, we're there. Silk City. Silk City. So, it has the name because there's a lot of silk action here.
Asia's biggest cocoon market. Asia's biggest cocoon market? Here? Yeah. Wow! Okay, so we're here, we're going to explore and show you a little bit about cocoons, and silk, and worms. Let's go.
all right, so, we made it inside. You have been here once before and you said it was relatively empty compared to the past? Yeah. Everything will be full.
maybe it's the season, we will try to figure out this answer, why. so apparently, it's a few holidays. So therefore, there's less people in here selling right now.
You can see there's tons of different tables. There's many different sellers. They get these cocoons from the outside, they bring them here sell them to a buyer. Yeah.
One of these tables, how many kilograms on 1 table? This table is 50kgs. You can see that table is about 80-90Kgs. Apparently there's 50kgs work worth of silk on that table.
But when you run your hands through it, it feels light as a feather. So it seems crazy that there's this much weight in one little container.
Heavy, huh? Yeah.
how long does it take for a worm to make that one cocoon? 5 days. 5 days?! so from the time that it starts to make the first piece of silk, it takes about 5 days to make one of those. Yeah. Interesting. Wow. So that's really fast!.
So the price of this can vary anywhere between 150 per kg all the way up to 400. depending on season and depending on how many people are in this shop.
Because if there's not many people here selling, then the price can be higher, because there's not as much competition.
And depending on the season, you could have better quality or...
You could have better quality or poorer quality. again, depending on the season.
so in order to judge the quality, one of the ways is, you pull on the thread. And it is and if it is very difficult to pull, then it is a high-quality thread.
If it is very thin, and brittle, and easy to remove from the egg, I guess you could say, the Cocoon, then it's a lower-quality thread.
And so, I guess they would do some tests and figure out the ratio of strong thread to weak thread, and that would indicate how much they want to pay for it.
Yeah? Yes. You understand? No.
the other interesting thing that they told us, is that this worm starts to make its thread, it is one thread.
It just starts with one thread and it keeps going, and going, and going. So it's not like tons of little fibers. It's one thread. Just woven in a circle for 5 days.
And yeah, so that's interesting. Just one. Yeah.
His name’s “Keede”. His name? “Keede”. What is it? “Keede”! “Keede”? Yes.
so when you hold these little worms in your hand, some of them are really gentle and they don't really do much.
And some of them wiggle like crazy. They just go crazy. They move all around like this.
I tried to get one on camera, I couldn't. But when we were walking in here earlier, we could.
This is what it looks like inside their cocoon. You can see they cut the top, and there's like a hole inside. It’s really cool! It’s so, so, smooth on the inside.
how long have you been in this business?
The day he was born. The day he was born? 60 years. 60 years.
What is your most favorite part about this type of business? Profits, mainly. It's a good profit.
If they have some capacity, they can make 1,000 kg also. One month. One month.
What is your least favorite part about doing this job?
Sometimes milk will come from this. Other times, the price will be so worst. It’s like waste. if some health problems happen to this. And you cannot control the outcome? It's random?
Weather. Weather. No water should be there. So they like hot and dry weather.
They sell them, and someone buys them, they take it apart... What do they do with the worm? so basically inside this is waste.
So what they do is, first thing, if they put it in hot water, it will die. One more thing, what they can do is, let's assume this is a male. So, male needs that it will be so thin.
Female means that it will be bigger. So they'll keep it one second, so it will produce eggs. And they use it for the next silk form. that is one way.
So, they don't take out the worm and do, like, stir-fry?
Silkworm rice?
They can put this for hens. Chickens? Chickens.
Also, when they go out and harvest this, and bring it and put it on the table, it'll last a maximum of seven days. And after that, they literally have to throw it. The threads deteriorate, the bug inside dies. So, it's low quality, and you have to throw it away.
Ideally, they'll sell it on the first day, up to day 3, day 4. And everything should be okay. But beyond that, everything gets a little bit crazy. And unfortunately they have to throw it away or sell it for a super low price.
so apparently these things will grow 365 days per year. In nature, it's dependent upon the weather.
But apparently many people grow them in a building, and so, as long as you keep moisture away from the cocoon, usually you get a high-quality yield.
So as you can see, the bidders have arrived. There's a lot of bidders here. Everyone uses a mobile app.
Basically, you go to the table, see the ID number of the table, and then you place a bid of the amount that you want to pay per kilogram.
And once you hit enter, let's say you say 200, and you get a red error kind of thing. It'll say no, your bid isn't high enough. So you enter to 220.
Then it will turn green saying that your bid is the highest. You are the winner.
And then on the TV behind me, we just had a power cut, but it shows the highest bid and then the seller will know how much he's going to earn per kg.
if 220 game, the person who said 200, for them it changes to red color. So if he is so good, he will take it to 230. So a competition happens.
Right now I am seeing numbers up there 350, 344, 330…that's the price per kg, but they don't just say “oh, I want 5 kgs”. No. Apparently the price is per kilogram for the entire table.
all right I just entered a factory where they take the raw cocoon and they remove the thread. It's a really interesting process.
So basically, they start with a giant basket full of the cocoons. and then they dump it into hot water. Once they dump it into hot water, they stir it for a bit.
And they remove.. they call it waste. there's a bit of waste string, waste silk that’s in there. And they remove that. After that, they scoop it out of the hot water and they dump it into the cool water.
And the women individually remove each thread and tie it around this giant spinning mechanism. and they have about a group of 10 cocoons at the same time, all into one string.
And they tie it around this big machine, and they do that about 8 or 10 times, on different mechanisms.
They turn the machine on. and the fast machine spins…removing all of the threads at the same time. It's a super-fast process. Super interesting.
and remember like I said before, each cocoon, it's one giant, big, string. So, once you activate it on the machine, it keeps going, and going, and going. It removes all of the string from that cocoon.
And I asked them what they do with the worms. nothing. Apparently they just remove them and throw them in a bucket.
After they remove the string from the cocoon, they actually put it on this machine back here which has coals underneath it. Fire. It helps dry the silk.
It spins it into a bigger bundle which then they create in to a silk string. and they sell that big silk string, like the rope, for 3,000 rupees per KG.
So a man from the previous place brought us over here, to this shop.
And he said that if you ever get low quality cocoons, all you need to do is bring it to this machine. It's kind of difficult to explain, but, it's all automatic.
You dump all of the balls and cocoons and bugs and everything into this machine.
It rolls in a circle really fast at the same time you dump hot water in it.
And this machine will automatically remove this string and bring it into a string line.
After that, it basically just creates a sheet.
A sheet of silk, of low quality silk. They go and hang it to dry.
so it is so interesting, they said basically something like this would sell as low as 800 rupees. A normal price would be about 1500, something like that. Within that range.
And they said basically someone would buy this and then they would change the color to white. They would make the brown colors go away. Make it as white as possible.
Then they would add color to make the final product. Maybe they want green. Maybe they want purple.
And they can stretch it and then they would cut it into the shapes that they want. sew it together to make a dress or a shirt or something like that.
He said that it takes between 5 and 10 minutes to make one of those sheets. Depending on the quality of the silk.
Now, we are actually on our way to a different building. I don't know, something else will happen in this process. I don't even understand it yet.
Okay, so the man showed us one of the final stages in this process, which is, they buy the bundles. and then they have these machines that make it go into a spindle, a small spindle.
And after you have a small spindle, you use a different machine which then puts it into a bigger spindle. And then if it runs out, you then put another spindle there and tie them together, so you get a very long piece of string. A big spindle.
Then you take those spindles, and you bring it to the very, very, large machine at the end. Tie all of those strings together. and you will put it on the very, very, big wheel. And it sits there for a while to create straight string.
So the string becomes straight. And after that, it is sold again, and they will probably do some dying and thread it into clothing. Yeah? Something like that? Yeah.
This whole day was sort of unplanned. All we wanted to do was go to the market where they bought and sold the cocoon. But then, it turned into this huge mission where we wanted to find the trail.
Yeah. It's so interesting. But one of the most interesting parts about this whole thing is that, this is not a tour.
this guy just drove around and knocked on doors, and said “hey, can we look inside your business, because it's cool”? Something like that.
Everyone was so kind. Yeah, so everyone had no idea that we were coming. This is not a tour of any kind. I don't know, we just knocked on doors. So crazy.
Anyway, that's it, thank you all for watching this crazy adventure. Your time is running out, start living! Yeah, take care.