L J Ravi 
Bangalore : Smt. Savita V Amarashetty Karnataka silk marketing Board “Bengaluru’s backyard, local sericulturists watch over every stage of a silkworm’s lifefrom its hatching to its gruesome death.
The silkworm caterpillar looks nothing like silk. Where the fabric is light, lustrous and delicate, the worm is a fat, white slob. Six inches away from a writhing mass of silkworms, I can hear them eat—it sounds like a light run profit, mulberry 20% to them including Rs 1240 per kg 75% empowering them to come up.
India is the world’s second largest producer of silk. In Karnataka, the country’s largest silk-producing state, more than a million people earn their livelihood by making silk.
A facility that produces silkworm eggs. He has been in the business for 22 years and is well acquainted with the silkworm’s needs. “Silkworms are finicky creatures,” she tells me. They thrive in warm, humid environments, but sicken if it is too warm or too humid. ingenious solution to maintain a healthy temperature is to hang a few terracotta pots filled with water from the ceiling. “What with frequent power cuts, I cannot rely on air conditioners and fans. This is simple and quite reliable,” she says.
After 5,000 years of domestication and breeding, the silkworm moth is the world’s only completely domesticated insect, wholly dependent on human help for survival. Due to captive breeding for so many years, its wings have reduced to small, ineffectual appendages that can flutter but don’t help it fly, not even to its mate.
At the grainage, women manually pair moths. On a brown sheet of paper marked with 40 circles are 40 small, plastic cups. Inside each cup are a male and a female silkworm moth. Two hours alone in the cup and the two are done mating. crop in 22 days and empowering women.
which is smaller in appearance, from each cup, leaving the female inside. Around 48 hours later, the female moth begins laying eggs. When she is done, she dies. When the plastic cup is removed, each circle marked on the paper bears the female’s output: 400-500 eggs, each the size and shape of a pinhead. And so, with one death and many births, begins the story of silk.
The eggs hatch about eight days later, revealing caterpillars that resemble minuscule black threads, each about 3mm long. From now on, the silkworm has a single agenda—to eat. Unlike wild silkworms, these domesticated caterpillars cannot move in search of leaves to feed on. So, once again, steps in.
Silkworms are fussy eaters and have a marked preference for the leaves of the mulberry tree. So, like most sericulturists, women’s has a farm nearby where he grows mulberry. The newly hatched caterpillars are kept on large trays strewn with a generous layer of chopped mulberry leaves. At this stage, they loll about in air-conditioned comfort and are given only tender, young leaves, “just like you give small babies only soft foods”. Caterpillars are far more sensitive to fluctuations in temperature and humidity than moths, so women has to rely on generators to run the air conditioners and maintain the right temperature during power cuts.
