Travancore Cocotuft (P) Limited, an Alappuzha-based subsidiary of the Travancore Mats & Matting Co, claims to have woven the world’s longest handloom coir doormat.
The mat, 101.6 metres long, 1.2 metres wide and 30mm thick apart from weighing 999kg, was unveiled by Cocotuft Chief Executive Officer P. Mahadevan during a press conference at the factory at Thiruvizha near Cherthala here on Wednesday.
The mat was made by two workers, spending 111 man days over a span of four months, inserting 4,70,000 coir tufts between alternate wefts of coir yarn. The production cost was a little over Rs. 4 lakh, Mr. Mahadevan said.
Crediting the idea of the mat to the Alappuzha BDS Project being implemented by Cluster Pulse, a non-governmental organisation working for the Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), Mr. Mahadevan said the project would be dedicated to the handloom weavers of Kerala.
The idea was to draw attention to the miserable conditions of the workers in the coir industry, despite the government having fixed their minimum wages at the highest slab for any sector. The reason, Mr. Mahadevan said, was that very few companies paid the workers the wages fixed by the government. Shortage of raw materials, migration of workers to the more lucrative construction sector, in turn leading to a shortage of trained hands in the coir industry were also among the problems plaguing the coir sector.
The doormat would be displayed at the exhibition being arranged in connection with the two-day Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Central Coir Research Institute of the Coir Board at Kalavoor from Thursday, he said.
