Weaving Change . How TCS hopes to transform artisans’ lives with its Bridgital Loom

Did you see the TCS Interactive booth? Wasn’t the “bridgital” loom cool? This was a common refrain at the recently concluded Adobe Summit at Las Vegas. It was certainly an out-of-the-ordinary display from the IT services giant, which was showcasing specially woven sarees—Kancheepuram sarees to be precise—at the event. The sarees had unusual motifs and told a story. For instance, one of the sarees paid a tribute to Adobe’s 40th anniversary, weaving in the distinctive A logo of its long-standing partner and combining elements of East and West (Rangoli Kolam patterns from south India and pottery motifs of Ancestral Puebloan native American Indians).

The sarees demonstrated at the event were created using TCS Bridgital Loom, a first-ever global marketplace powered by TCS IP and Adobe technologies. At the booth TCS also showcased a unique solution called TwinX, a platform that creates a faithful virtual copy of a physical entity, or a digital twin. Behind the booth was a separate studio called One Design, under the brand of TCS Design.

But what does an IT services firm have to do with Kancheepuram weaves, you may ask? As Kamal Bhadada, the San-Diego based President and Global head of TCS Interactive, explains, “It’s a passion and purpose project for the company to show how digital transformation can bring change to an artisanal community.”

Adobe CEO TCS booth visit | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

“Not only can it transform the weavers’ lives, the bridgital loom can also bring the power of choice to a consumer,’ adds Ranganathan Sundaram, Global Head, Ecosystem Initiatives and Strategic Initiatives, TCS Interactive, explaining the uncertainties the weaving community face and the compromises a customer usually makes. “Imagine the uncertainty of investing all their money into weaving a saree not knowing if the design would sell—they have to keep second guessing what a customer would like. And often you will find unsold stocks with the weavers. On the other hand, you have customers who don’t exactly get what they want —they might like the design of a blue saree in a shop, but wished it was in mustard colour, and the border could have been that of a different saree. But they have to settle for what’s available.”

Igniting Innovation

This was the problem that TCS decided to solve. Interestingly, the TCS Ignite team was set to work on the project. TCS Ignite is a six-month intense learning programme for science graduates that the company recruits to make them adjust to the IT industry, and they are set projects to do. The Bridgital loom is the sum total of the work done by batch after batch of trainees over several years. Along the way, they did several field pilots too—going to Bengal, to Gujarat, to Varanasi, to Maheshwar, working with weavers, showing them what was done, and then refining it. “What you see today is a labour of love that has gone on I would say for almost a decade,” says Muralitharan V, Metaverse Consultant and Head of TCS Ignite Metaverse Labs.

Using digital technologies, the TCS team has utterly re-imagined the way a saree is designed, woven, and transacted, thereby adding value to the product and bringing choice to the consumer. In the traditional world, the weaver designs the saree, weaves it and sells it. In the new marketplace that TCS envisages, the process is reversed. The customer designs it, pays for it and then the weaver creates it. The customer enters a metaverse, using VR headsets, gets a glimpse of all the patterns and motifs available, and can even ask for a custom designed motif, choose colours, and see how it looks virtually draped on a mannequin. Once the design is finalised, it is sent to the weaver.

And there’s more. Suppose the saree is for an anniversary party, and you want to give a return gift to the people attending, you could take a portion from the saree, and convert it into wall arts, or bags or whatever you want from it. The bridgital loom also allows for NFTs to be created from it. So suddenly, for the weaver, the value of the saree order goes up three or four times as the canvas gets broader. A saree that a weaver may have charged ₹20,000 for, can now command ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh for the sheer exclusivity and uniqueness of design, and if there are a range of products being created around it, that could further propel the value.

It doesn’t end there. The TCS software also creates a coffee table book on the creation—explaining the making of the saree, the motifs, the story behind the chosen pattern, and how it all came together, creating a tangible memento of the experience for the customer. And the digital twin of the saree exists in the system.

The Inspiration

Sundaram describes how there were multiple inspirations for the Handloom 4.0 project, as they call it. The first inspiration came from S Ramadorai, former CEO and MD of TCS, who was the chairman of the National Skills Development Agency from 2013 to 2016 and who challenged the TCS team to work with weavers and see how they could help them. Then came Tata Sons’ chairman N Chandrasekaran’s book Bridgital Nation which talked about digital transformation to solve the nation’s problems and it further inspired the team. When TCS recruited the daughter of a weaver and after her training put her on the handloom project, it further inspired the team, as they learnt first hand about the challenges the community faced.

As both Muthulakshmi Nellaiappan, entrepreneur in residence at TCS, and Kamal Bhadada explain, the handloom weaving process is extremely complex . The weavers first sketch a pattern on a graph sheet. And then punch the patterns into a jacquard card. It takes a long time to set up a loom as the punch cards are a laborious process. Thousands of cards are punched for one saree. These cards attached to the loom control the movement of thread, yielding the design on the fabric. In every cluster like Kanchipuram or Benaras they have a set of standard motifs—around 100 to 120 motifs—and these are what the weaver works with. All these motifs have been codified into the punch cards.

But, if a customer were to ask the weavers to weave a motif – say the Eiffel Tower – onto a saree, they have to spend time creating that motif and creating cards for it. This is where TCS stepped in.

BORN-DIGITAL: A mannequin showcasing a Bridgital loom saree

In the TCS intervention, the design process was transferred to a computer. The technology team worked on creating electronic cards which could replace the chain of cards that are loaded on to the looms. “We also used technology in pattern recognition. There are usually 20-30 combinations and thanks to the pattern recognition software, we were able to reduce the number of cards,” says Bhadada.

As Nellaippan points out, not only did the electronic cards bring efficiency to the design process but it also has become a repository of knowledge. “We heard from many senior weavers in Kancheepuram that their skill was not getting passed through to the next generation. They were so happy to work with us for over the last few years in making sure that the skill and the knowledge is kept, even if it is in the form of a software. As it gets weaved in the fabric, the image is also transferred and stored in pixels.”

Sundaram points out how TCS created its own Bridgital Loom which makes the weaving much more efficient and can take input through an IoT, convert any design that you do through a VR or a web into a format which the electronic jacquard can receive and do it. “So, there’s a hardware and software concept to it.”

While TCS has solved the problem and showed proof of concept, it is not yet commercialised and still in their research labs. Though as Badada says it is a massively scalable application and can be replicated by other weavers—be it Benaras, Maheshwar, or elsewhere. Muthulakshmi says, TCS is now trying to work through a business model for this.

For the TCS team, the biggest delight was when the weaver father of the TCS staffer sat on the bridgital loom and said it was one of his proudest moments that he could see that his daughter would now work as a technology person on the same craft that has been the family’s livelihood for generations. “What we have done is to unlock the value of six yards of material by looking at it slightly differently,” concludes Sundaram.

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