Sericulture provides immense scope for self-employment as majority of the rearers of Assam are poor and the question of hired labor hardly arises. Generally, all the working members of the rearing families work together to complete the rearing processes. Within the sericulture sector, ericulture has been practised by a majority of families. It requires comparatively less investment, involves low risk and thus can be easily carried out by the poor villagers. Therefore, the exact number of people engaged in ericulture cannot be approximated correctly. Moreover, as it is a part-time occupation it is very difficult to estimate the generation of man-hours or man-days per unit of output exactly from the secondary data.

Ericulture is an agro-based industry, the end product of which is `silk'. It occupies an important position among all the sericulture activities in Assam mostly practiced by the poor villagers especially the women. It provides an alternative scope of employment and income to a wider section of population for a long period of time. The agro-based Assam economy observes sluggish economic growth (average annual growth of Net State Domestic Product (NSDP) from 1990-91 to 1998-99 at 1993-94 price is about 1.8% as per Economic Survey) and industrial development along with rapid population growth (from about 2.24 cr in 1991 to over 2.66 cr in 2001) that resulted in massive unemployment. Agriculture is the primary occupation of the majority of population (64% in 1991). Whereas per capita availability of land has declined severely from 0.54 hectare in 1971 to merely 0.29 hectare in 2001 (De, 2006); which is also the lowest among all the North-Eastern States and also marginally below the all India average (0.30 hectare per capita). This sector is thus already overburdened with surplus labor. According to the World Bank Report (2000), the size of operational holdings per family has shrunk to less than 0.05 hectare. Percentage of labor force remains unemployed during 1999-2000 was 4.6% that is the highest among all the North-Eastern States (National Human Development Report, 2001). The state is also one of the poorest states in India with around 36.09% (1999-2000) of its population still living under poverty line. These are the activities of `low investment and high output' and because it is cheapness compared to muga and mulberry silk, eri-fabric is called `poorman's wool' or `poorman's silk' (Benchamin and Jolly, 1987).

Thousands of families in Assam have been engaged directly or indirectly in various ericulture activities like sowing of seed; plantation of host plant; maintenance of plants; plucking of leaves from the planted trees and wildly grown trees; feeding and rearing of pupae up to cocoon stage; spinning of yarn; weaving of fabrics; marketing of cocoons (intermediate product) and cloths (final product), etc. Here, spinning and weaving are taken place at home on a very small scale with simple traditional tools by a section of eri cocoon rearers. All the cocoon rearers are not the weavers and large section owing to the ignorance and poverty, sell their reared cocoon to the middlemen traders that add comparatively low to their family income with respect to the eri-rearers cum endi-entrepreneurs.

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