Paying for a Distant War: Surat's Migrant Textile Workforce Is Leaving 'Coz It has Run Out of Gas

Surat's textile industry runs on approximately 10 lakh migrant workers, most of them interstate migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, and Odisha, without local ration cards, permanent addresses, or registered LPG connections. In normal times, this documentation gap is managed through informal supply chains—mini cylinders, shared refill arrangements, and open-market purchases that, while expensive, remain within the bounds of a daily wage.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed and India's LPG imports tightened, those informal chains were the first to snap. Around 90% of these workers now have, as one industry leader has put it, zero access to LPG cylinders.

Ashish Gujarati, Past President of the Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, is direct about the mechanics: "Before the war, they were managing with some other sources. Around 90% of the migrant workers—we have around 10 lakh migrant workers— now have 0% access to LPG cylinders."

The registered domestic connection, issued against a ration card that most migrants do not possess, has never been within their reach. The open market, their only alternative, has now effectively closed through price and scarcity.

The fallback options have also been systematically eliminated. Workers living in the cramped rental accommodations of industrial belts such as Pandesara, Sachin, and Udhna have found that landlords categorically prohibit the use of wood or other solid fuels indoors, citing the risk of smoke damage.

The subsistence cycle has collapsed at every point: no cylinder, no wood, no affordable alternative, no meal. For a worker earning ₹400 a day, a mini cylinder priced at the same amount represents an entire day's wage spent on fuel alone—before a single rupee goes toward food, rent, or anything else.

The dynamics of shared accommodation have made this worse. When four or five workers share a room, the cost of living is manageable; when one or two decide to leave, the rest find it unviable to stay and follow. The zari industry has felt this acutely. Sandip Rana, Treasurer of the Surat Jari Manufacturers Association, notes that while industry leaders offered to help workers with induction cooktops as an alternative, landlords objected—the electricity bills would shoot up. The zari sector is consequently reporting a production drop of 25 to 30%. Committee member Anay Jariwala is direct: "A labour crisis has arisen as people are going back to their villages."

The industry has attempted to respond. Mitul Mehta of Rudraksh Synthetic Pvt Ltd, operating out of the GIDC Sachin area, was among the first to go public—posting a video appeal in which he noted that his 1,500-worker facility had made food arrangements inside the premises, extended to family members at no charge, and urged other mill owners to do the same. Several others have followed. Community kitchens have been set up collectively in some industrial clusters.

Ramesh Dhanani, President of the Man Made Sizers Association, notes that his association has been providing alternate fuels like firewood to workers and has started in-factory food facilities to prevent them from leaving. These are not trivial efforts.

But Gujarati acknowledges their limit plainly: "We have started community kitchens. But that provides a solution for only around 3 to 5%. Catering to 10 lakh workers and their families is a huge task."

A spokesperson for the South Gujarat Productivity Council (SGPC) offers an important clarification: the dyeing and processing houses in Surat do not, in fact, use LPG—they run on piped gas, which has continued to flow uninterrupted. The factories, in other words, are still running. The crisis is not on the production floor of these units; it is in the workers' homes. 

Migrants without formal domestic gas connections, according to the SGPC official, have been buying LPG at a premium on the open market. Now that supply has dried up entirely, they have no way to cook—and so they are leaving. The community kitchens that have come up are helping, but they are a patch on a problem that is structural in nature.

The structural consequence is one that wages and employment conditions alone cannot address. A worker who has a job but cannot cook is not, in any practical sense, able to remain in the city. Labour availability now depends not on whether work exists, but on whether workers can cook—something the industry has never been structured to provide.

The energy constraints bearing down on Surat's textile industry operate on two distinct but reinforcing tracks. The first affects workers in their homes. The second strikes at the production floor itself. Even where labour has remained available, the industry has found that its core manufacturing processes are caught in the same supply failure that has emptied workers' kitchens.

Textile processing in Surat depends on high-temperature energy inputs—steam generation, yarn heat-setting through autoclave processes, boiler-driven heating—that have no ready substitute.

Gujarati is unambiguous on this point: "LPG is used to generate steam. Solar energy cannot generate steam at the required level. The maximum temperature we can attain is around 70 degrees, but dyeing requires temperatures above 100 degrees."

The LNG pipeline network, he notes, offers an alternative but only within city limits—areas outside remain entirely dependent on LPG. For the Man Made Sizers Association, the position is similarly constrained: Dhanani notes that while sizing yarn production does not use LPG directly, the heating and steaming processes require high-temperature, high-pressure boilers for which neither solar nor any other readily available energy source is a viable replacement.

The supply of commercial LPG connections—used for processes like yarn heat-setting—has itself fallen by up to 50%, compounding the residential shortage with an industrial one. The consequences have moved through the value chain rapidly. Units that were managing on reduced allocations have found those allocations cut further, forcing decisions that would, in ordinary times, be unthinkable: suspending entire shifts, cancelling night operations, and in some cases halting production lines that have no fuel to run.

The South Gujarat Textile Processors Association has responded by formalising what was already becoming an informal reality: around 400 processing mills will now remain closed two days every week, with closures staggered on alternate days to conserve fuel and preserve partial employment. In the weaving segment, the contraction has gone further, with several units already reduced to approximately four working days per week.

These are not reactive, ad hoc decisions. The two-day shutdown was taken unanimously by SGTPA, explicitly framed as a mechanism to reduce production costs and maintain supply-demand balance over the longer term. The language of managed contraction—deliberate, collective, unanimous—marks a shift from crisis response to something more permanent: a lower floor from which the industry now operates.

The cost pressures compounding this contraction extend well beyond fuel. Raw material prices (those of yarn, dyes, and chemicals) have risen by 35% to 50%, pushing the overall cost of the dyeing process up by nearly 30%.

Gujarati frames the bind starkly: "If you look at raw materials—yarn, dyes, chemicals—the price rise ranges from 35% to 50%. But we cannot increase fabric prices proportionately because there is no demand."

Returned goods, delayed payments, and what one industry official has described as outright cheating in the market have added a layer of financial distress that sits beneath and apart from the energy crisis, widening the pressure on units that are already operating on severely compressed margins.

The humanitarian and industrial dimensions of this crisis have not unfolded in parallel—they have accelerated each other. As workers have left, production capacity has fallen. As production capacity has fallen, the economic rationale for maintaining full operations has weakened further.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: each departure makes the next shutdown more likely, and each shutdown makes it harder to persuade the remaining workers to stay.

The scale of the labour outflow has been significant. Between five and six lakh workers are estimated to have already left Gujarat, with the exodus continuing. Industry estimates place immediate production losses at 30 to 35%, with some clusters already reporting drops of up to 50%, and projections—should the disruption persist—reaching as high as 70%.

Gujarati does not soften the outlook: "We cannot assess accurately, but it could be 50% production loss, maybe even 70%." What makes this figure particularly sobering is that it comes not from an outside analyst projecting a worst case, but from someone inside the industry who is watching it unfold.

The distress visible at the railway stations is not the distress of workers choosing to go home for the harvest season or ahead of a festival. It is departure under compulsion. Workers have been seen in visible anguish at platforms, a detail that speaks to the involuntary nature of the movement.

These are people who came to Surat for wages and are leaving despite wages still being on offer—because the city has ceased to be a place where survival is possible. Seasonal mobility is a known variable. What is happening now is categorically different.

The financial stress within the industry has its own vocabulary. An official of the Surat Mercantile Association has described 80% of units as being "on ventilator," citing returned goods, late payments, and cheating as the compounding factors. This is a portrait of an industry that was already under considerable strain before the energy shock arrived—one in which the LPG crisis has not created fragility so much as exposed and deepened it. The at least 400 units dependent on coal face a parallel vulnerability, with only 10 to 20 days of stock reported to remain.

Surat has absorbed shocks before—the pneumonic plague of 1994, the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, flooding, and episodes of social unrest. Gujarati acknowledges the city's history of resilience: "Surat has faced crises before—pandemic, floods, plague. What we do is try to stop migration and take care of workers' basic needs."

But he also concedes what makes this moment different: the crisis is simultaneously a supply-side energy failure, a raw material cost surge, and a labour flight—three pressures that the industry's historical coping mechanisms were never designed to address at the same time. The resilience that carried Surat through earlier crises is now being tested on multiple fronts at once.

The Cost of Cheap Labour

Surat's crisis is, at its core, a story about externalised costs. The industry has long remained competitive by leaving the question of worker survival to the workers themselves—informal fuel markets, informal housing, informal food arrangements. That model has held, more or less, in stable times. What March 2026 has demonstrated is that it cannot withstand a serious external shock. When the informal systems fail, the labour disappears, and the factories follow. The harder question—whether an industry can remain viable when it offloads basic survival onto those least able to bear it—remains unanswered.