In a cramped shed behind Sharjipet village, a young man watches his mother, Laxmi, wince after every one of the 9,000 arm circles it takes to prepare a single Pochampally sari. By 1999 he will have turned those circles into one smooth, 90-minute glide.
The Small Idea
A hand-cranked, motor-assisted “asu” frame that winds 4,500 metres of silk onto pegs in the time it takes to drink two cups of tea.
The Big Impact
Across Nalgonda and Warangal districts, women once locked into six-hour marathons of pain now run micro-enterprises: 800 machines, 10,000 revived looms, and weaver families whose loom counts jumped from four to forty in three monsoon cycles.
The Pochampally sari is born twice: first in dye, then in motion. Before the coloured threads ever meet the loom, they must be wound—thread by thread—around wooden pegs in a semi-circle wide enough for a woman’s outstretched arm. The local name for this pre-loom ballet is ‘asu’. One sari yields approximately 9,000 swings. Two saris a day, 18,000 swings. By the age of forty, most women have shoulders that creak like old teak doors.
Chintakindi Mallesham, a tenth-grade dropout who had never seen the inside of an engineering college, decided the creaking had to stop. He began with a bamboo frame, a cycle sprocket and the stubbornness of someone who has watched pain up close. Between 1992 and 1998 he earned, saved, melted, recast and re-earned whatever he could. Neighbours laughed; banks shrugged. Each prototype failed a little differently: threads snapped, pegs wobbled, and motors overheated.
The hinge came on an ordinary February afternoon in 1999.
While repairing a power-looming unit in Balanagar, Mallesham noticed how a simple cam-and-lever movement could mimic the human wrist’s twist around each peg. He skipped lunch that day, skipped wages too, and walked home with a fist-sized steel cam in his pocket. That night the first Laxmi Asu machine—named, of course, after its first beneficiary—spun a flawless 90-minute Asu. Laxmi herself used it for the next sari and felt, for the first time in decades, no fire in her shoulder.
Word spread faster than monsoon rain. By 2001, sixty machines dotted the weaving hamlets. Steel replaced wood, microcontrollers replaced guesswork, and noise dropped 90%.
Lingamma, a widowed mother of two, mortgaged her nose ring to buy the seventh unit. She began charging ₹300 per sari for asu services.
Fifteen years later, she owned a pucca house, two engineering graduate daughters, and a second machine. Multiply Lingamma by the hundreds, and you begin to sense the quiet earthquake Mallesham set off.