ASSAM: Dipak Bhuyan is no engineer, nor is he technician. Fixing appliances has been his passion. You would find him at his Sivasagar residence sitting in a nest of iron bars of various shapes and sizes that had piled up as he worked on his dream project 15 years ago. His efforts did not go in vain. After five years of relentless efforts, he created the ‘Maina Semi-automatic Handloom’. Since then, it has revolutionised Assam’s weaving landscape.Bhuyan, a BSc (Mathematics) who retired as a superintendent engineer from the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in 2015, had set up an enterprise with ten handlooms. However, the response was not satisfactory. He visualised a loom which can be operated by anyone. Efforts began soon and he innovated his semi-automatic loom, made entirely of iron, in 2015. He got a patent too.His company, Dipak Bhuyan Creation Private Limited, rolled it out in the market in 2016. It was an instant hit, prompting Bhuyan to augment the production. All along, he kept upgrading the loom. He makes the primary machinery, and gets the accessories made outside Assam.“We have so far sold more than 1,200 looms of different variants in the Northeast, mostly Assam. Some were purchased in West Bengal too,” says Bhuyan’s son Sanglap.So why is this loom unique? Sanglap says, “To my knowledge, ours is the only semi-automatic loom that operates faster than any other such unit. There are some in Assam. They can also work fast but for 1-2 minutes. Our loom can work fast and continuously for upto 10 minutes. It is unique because you don’t have to be an expert weaver to operate it. Union minister Sarbananda Sonowal had also tried his hand at it. He could weave around two inches in minutes.”
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