Protecting Odisha's GI heritage

The digital economy is working exceptionally well for counterfeiters

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Sambalpuri weaving is older than most Indian institutions we treat as sacred.

The double ikat technique practiced in Bargarh and Nuapatna predates the Constitution, the Railways, and certainly predates any government scheme designed to protect it. For centuries, the craft sustained itself not through state patronage but through an unspoken contract between the weaver, the community, and the buyer. Trust embedded in thread.

That contract is being broken. Quietly, efficiently, and largely without consequence. Search any major Indian e-commerce platform for Sambalpuri sarees today. The results are dominated by power-loom copies, priced at Rs 400 or Rs 600, carrying regional labels that actual weavers spent generations earning. Nobody is being prosecuted. Nobody in the digital supply chain is being held responsible. The GI tag that Sambalpuri fabric carries, a legal instrument meant to protect geographical origin, has essentially become decorative in the online marketplace.

The numbers behind this are not disputed. National surveys on handloom sector viability have consistently recorded that nearly six in ten weavers across India have lost measurable market share to machine-made imitations over the last decade. In Bargarh district, where the craft is not a cottage industry but the primary economy for nearly 30,000 families, weavers earn between Rs 250 and Rs 350 daily. Skilled, experienced, irreplaceable workers paid less than what a food delivery rider earns in an urban tier-two city on a slow afternoon.

This is the context inside which the state’s Digital Odisha push is happening. The state has real digital ambitions. Startup Odisha, Mo Sarkar, ONDC integration, broadband reach into districts that previously had nothing. These matter. But somewhere in the enthusiasm for digitisation as progress, a harder question is being avoided: digitisation for whom?