Coir Board in Kochi: What It Does From Coir House on MG Road
The Coir Board, set up under a 1953 Act, promotes and develops India's coir industry from Coir House, MG Road, Kochi. What it does and who it helps.
The Coir Board is the central government body that develops and promotes India's coir industry, and its head office is in Kochi, at Coir House on MG Road. It was set up under the Coir Industry Act, 1953, works under the Union Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), and runs research, training, export promotion and support schemes for everyone from home spinners to exporters. Its research arm sits in Alappuzha, at the Central Coir Research Institute in Kalavoor, with a second institute in Bengaluru.
- Where is Coir Board situated?
- Is there a Coir Board in Kerala?
- What does the Coir Board actually do?
- Which Coir Board schemes can help a Kochi business?
- How big is India's coir trade?
Where is Coir Board situated?
The head office is Coir House, MG Road, Kochi. The Board's research and training offices are in Alappuzha and Bengaluru, and it keeps regional offices in the states where the industry has a real presence. If you drive down MG Road often enough you will have passed it without a second look; that office is where an industry spread across small units in coastal villages meets the central government. It sits in the same club as the other commodity bodies Kochi hosts, like the Coconut Development Board and the Spices Board.
Is there a Coir Board in Kerala?
Yes, and it is not a state body. The Coir Board is a national, statutory body of the Government of India that happens to be headquartered in Kerala, which is a major centre of coir production. It answers to the Union MSME ministry, not the state government, so a question about a Kerala government coir scheme belongs with the state, not with the Board.
What does the Coir Board actually do?
Coir is the fibre from coconut husk. The Board's job is to grow the industry built on it, and its work falls into a few buckets:
- Research: two institutes, the Central Coir Research Institute at Kalavoor in Alappuzha and the Central Institute of Coir Technology in Bengaluru, work on new products and cleaner processing.
- Training: skill programmes for spinners and artisans, including the Mahila Coir Yojana, a self-employment scheme that trains women to spin coir fibre into yarn.
- Markets: trade fairs, exhibitions and export promotion, plus its own sales outlets for coir products.
- Support for units: entrepreneurship and awareness programmes; the MSME ministry also supports coir enterprises through the Board and PMEGP, the central employment-generation subsidy scheme, as Indian Masterminds has reported.
The products go well beyond doormats: matting and carpets, rope and yarn, geotextiles used for erosion control on slopes and embankments, and coir pith for gardening and soil conditioning.
Which Coir Board schemes can help a Kochi business?
Most of the Board's support runs through an umbrella scheme called Coir Vikas Yojana. The terms of reference for a government evaluation of the scheme, published by the government's Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office, list its components as:
| Component | Who it is for |
|---|---|
| Science and Technology | Research and product development |
| Coir Industry Technology Upgradation Scheme (CITUS) | Units modernising their machinery |
| Skill Upgradation and Mahila Coir Yojana | Workers and women artisans |
| Export Market Promotion | Exporters |
| Domestic Market Promotion | Sellers in India |
| Trade and Industry Related Functional Support Services | Industry-wide services |
| Welfare measures | Workers, through insurance cover |
Scheme names and components have shifted over the years, so treat that table as a map, not a guarantee. For someone in Kochi thinking about a coir pith or geotextile unit, PMEGP is the scheme to ask the Board about first. It also helps to have your Udyam MSME registration sorted before you start talking to any MSME-linked office.
How big is India's coir trade?
Speaking to the press in Kochi in January 2025, Union MSME minister Jitan Ram Manjhi put coir exports for the previous financial year at Rs 3,388 crore and production at 7.9 lakh tonnes, and said the export target for the following year had been fixed at Rs 5,000 crore. That is a sizeable jump to ask of an industry still run largely by small units. Our view: the Board's most useful work for Kerala is less the glossy trade fair and more the research on pith processing and geotextiles, because that is where coir moves from a cheap mat to something a highway contractor buys by the truckload. More on the city's institutions in Business.
Written By
Haila Kochi Editorial Team
Part of the Haila Kochi editorial team, covering the food, business, lifestyle, and people that make Kochi what it is.
