Silk is one of the oldest trades on earth providing a turnover of 2,000 cr for India. Sericulture provides gainful employment, and facilitates economic development and improvement in the quality of life of the people in rural areas. It, therefore, plays a vital role in antipoverty program and prevents migration of rural people to urban area in search of employment. In India, 60 lakh people are involved in this occupation. Sericulturists practice indigenous managerial skill to cultivate silk; because of this India is unable to produce enough quantity of silk to meet the growing demand. A survey shows that sericulturists merely adopt the available technology in their sericulture management, but the critical areas also need to adopt the technology in order to meet the demand. There is an urgent need to adopt specific modern and mechanized systems at all levels of sericulture activities. Some of the low-cost tools discussed in this paper and other tools developed by Japan and CSRI, India, are recommended at various levels of sericulture activities. Sericulturists by making best use of the modern low-cost tools in silk rearing, mulberry harvesting and pruning can enjoy a huge market not only domestically, but also globally.

The present global silk production is fluctuating around 70,000 to 90,000 MT (The Times of India, 2005) and the demand for silk is annually increasing by 5%. Though India is the second largest producer of raw silk in the world and more than 60 lakh people (Jaishankar, 2007) are involved in silk process, still there exists an enormous gap between demand and supply of the lustrous fiber. Against an annual demand of 25,000 MT, the quantum of raw silk production in the country has stagnated at 15,000 MT. Sericulturists can exploit this situation with silk products, particularly the fabulous sarees, enjoying a huge market not only domestically, but also globally.

Silk productivity in the country is low due to lack of implementation of new technologies and unskilled labor force. Hence, the huge task of developing trained sericulture professionals and adopting modernized gadgets in this field has become obligatory.

Operations Management Journal, Relative Efficiencies of Schools, Data Envelopment Analysis, Government-Aided Schools, Linear Programming Model, Decision-Making Units, Organizational Units, Human Resources, Public Procurement Sectors, Government Schools, Education System.