Sambalpuri weaving is older than most Indian institutions we treat as sacred. The double ikat technique practised 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 the thread.
That contract is being bro ken. Quietly, efficiently, and largely without consequence. Search any major Indian e-commerce platform for Sambalpuri sarees today. The results are dominated by power-loom cop ies, 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 are 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 Odis ha push is happening. The state has real digital ambitions. Start up 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?
Because right now, the digital economy is working exceptionally well for counterfeiters. It has lowered their distribution costs, expanded their reach, and given them access to the same marketplace branding that genuine weavers use. The playing field is not level. It is tilted, and the tilt has been engineered by policy neglect.
The authentication tools to address this are not experimental. AI-driven digital watermarking, already standard in pharmaceutical exports and premium fashion supply chains, can be adapted to embed cryptographic provenance into every GI-certified textile at the point of registration. A buyer anywhere in the world scans a code and knows exactly which cluster produced the fabric, under which certified weaver’s registration. Telan Gana ran a version of this for Pochampally ikat from 2021, and early data showed certified weavers recovering a 15 to 18% price premium through verified channels alone. Odisha has the institutional scaffolding, the GI registrations, and the digital infrastructure to replicate this. What it has not produced is the policy decision to do so.
The middleman problem compounds everything. Field research across Odisha’s weaving districts shows rural craft producers consistently capturing only 20 to 25% of the final retail price of their own work. The rest is extracted across intermediate diary layers whose only real advantage is information: who is buying, at what price, through which platform. Generative AI tools built for Odia-language, low-literacy interfaces can close that gap. The transactional infrastructure for direct artist-to-buyer commerce already exists in India’s digital public stack. But without GI-authenticated digital storefronts and weaver-facing pricing tools, that infrastructure serves the aggregator, not the artisan.
Odisha needs a GI Data Governance Policy. Not a paragraph inside an IT roadmap, but a standalone legal framework with teeth. Mandatory digital registration of certified artisans, criminal liability for counterfeit digital listings, a grievance process that does not require a lawyer or a data plan to navigate and a state-backed, authenticated marketplace that routes buyers directly to verified producers.
The craft is not dying from irrelevance. It is being starved by a policy environment that celebrates digital growth without asking who it is actually growing for. That question deserves a serious answer. Before the looms go quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with skill.
The writer is a policy researcher working on governance, development policy, and AI ethics.