Saree weaver with no engineering degree invented machine replacing 9,000 hand movements

It all started when Chintakindi Mallesham’s mother said “I can’t weave anymore. My hands have worn out.” A saree may take pride of place in a wardrobe, but for the woman who helps make it, the beauty of the finished six-yard fabric can come after hours of repetitive, physically exhausting work. “For one saree, a 12km thread is wound nearly 9000 times.”For Chintakindi Mallesham, that reality was impossible to ignore. He had grown up in a family of handloom weavers in Sharjipet, Telangana, watching his mother Laxmi work on a painstaking process called Asu, an essential step in preparing yarn for the traditional Pochampalli tie-and-dye saree.What his mother said to him that day stayed with him- that eventually led a young man with little formal education and no engineering training to build a machine that would change the way thousands of weavers approached one of the most laborious stages of…