Livelihoods

Much of India's textile waste is too mixed or contaminated to resell, reuse or recycle. Asha Singhal, Director, Nature of Fashion at The Biomimicry Institute, explains what the fourth Nature of Fashion pilot will target, what India can take from earlier work in Ghana, the Netherlands and Germany, and why local conditions must shape the technologies tested.

India generates an estimated 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste a year, and much of the low-value, mixed or contaminated fraction has no commercially viable end-of-life pathway. Shruti Goel, Chief Executive Officer of Upaya Social Ventures, explains how a new accelerator run with The Biomimicry Institute will support decomposition enterprises while tying their growth to dignified, verifiable employment.

Traditional garments across India carry knowledge of materials, construction, climate and local identity, yet many have not been explored for contemporary markets. The Weavers' Service Centre, Chamoli, has tested one approach with Uttarakhand's Dokha, a heavy woollen winter garment. Its lighter, shorter cotton version has since passed through field training to weavers, and commercial production has begun in Khatima.

A four-year European Union-funded project coordinated by Fairtrade International has concluded after reaching more than 9,500 cotton farmers and 700 textile manufacturers across India, with a primary focus on Tamil Nadu. The initiative delivered digital sustainability tools, capacity-building programmes, and market links between Indian suppliers and European buyers.

For generations, master artisans across India and the Global South supplied luxury markets while their names stayed hidden behind export houses, intermediaries and non-disclosure agreements. A new incubator asks whether that labour can carry its own name and command luxury value. Susan Walker, whose nonprofit Ibu operates from the American city of Charleston, explains how visibility and price might converge.

India's craft sector employs millions of women in home-based work, often paid by the piece and rarely counted in corporate accountability. As machine-made imitations spread, the question of fair pay grows sharper. Katherine Neuman, who runs House of Wandering Silk in Delhi, examines how replication, pricing and storytelling together decide the fortunes of traditional makers.

As slow fashion turns handmade cloth into a selling point, the artisans behind Ikat and Kantha have gained visibility without a matching rise in pay or security. The imbalance raises a pointed question about who profits from the story of craft. Megha Agarwal, founder of Studio Maeve, weighs whether artisan recognition delivers genuine dignity or borrowed branding.

Himroo, a centuries-old silk-and-cotton weave from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, had fallen from thousands of handlooms to none still working. Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, who founded the social enterprise LoomKatha, argues that reviving such a craft depends less on preserving skill than on rebuilding the market and the visibility that sustain it, not on the loom alone.

For generations, the women who hand-paint Kalamkari cloth in southern Andhra Pradesh sold their labour without their names attached to it. Anita Reddy, a social worker who founded the artisan collective DWARAKA, set out to change that by placing control of both the making and the pricing with the women themselves, from the first outline to the final price.

The first widely available Lifecycle Assessment study for cashmere has been released, covering nomadic grazing and farmed production systems across China and Mongolia. The study identifies primary production as the dominant impact stage and finds herd-level management and productivity as the key drivers, offering brands a baseline for targeted intervention and sourcing decisions.