The date commemorates the Swadeshi Movement, launched on 7 August 1905 at Calcutta Town Hall in response to the partition of Bengal. The movement urged Indians to boycott foreign goods and adopt indigenous products, and hand-woven cloth became its most visible symbol — an economic weapon as much as a cultural one, since imported mill cloth had displaced Indian handloom production through the nineteenth century. The Government of India designated 7 August as National Handloom Day in recognition of that history, and the first observance was held on 7 August 2015. The choice of date deliberately links a contemporary livelihood question to a moment in the freedom struggle.

The single most exam-relevant statistic is the gender composition: over 72% of the 35.22 lakh people in the handloom workforce are women. That makes handloom one of the most female-concentrated occupations in the Indian economy, and it explains why handloom policy is regularly discussed under women's economic empowerment rather than only under textiles. The e-Pehchan portal addresses a related structural problem — weavers working from home in scattered clusters have historically been invisible to welfare systems for want of documentation, and a digital identity card is the precondition for reaching them with credit, insurance and scheme benefits. The award categories, meanwhile, map the country's regional weaving traditions: Kanchipuram silk of Tamil Nadu, Ikat of Telangana, Kani shawls of Jammu and Kashmir, and Muga silk of Assam.