The textile and apparel industry makes for a predominantly important part of India’s economy, making up about 17 per cent of its export income and employing about 45 million of the country’s population. Of this figure, as per Open Global Rights, 60 per cent are women, making the industry the largest employer of women in India. That said, this number, in reality, could be anywhere between 60 to 80 per cent owing to the number of women informally employed in unorganised parts of the textile industry.
The textile industry has garment and manufacturing clusters in each part of the country, specifically including Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon, Ludhiana and Kanpur in the northern part of the country, Kolkata in the east, Mumbai and Gujarat in the west and Chennai, Bengaluru, and Tirupur in southern parts of India. When it comes to garment manufacturing, it’s notable that the share of women workers has been steadily increasing over the years, from 33.1 per cent in ’93-94 to 40.3 per cent in 2011-12, as per a 2015 report by Mezzadri & Srivastava. But even as the female share makes a predominant part of these clusters, the gender wage gap continues to prevail.
The Tirupur Problem
Of all the above-mentioned garment clusters across the country, Tirupur in Tamil Nadu has seen a decently accelerated rate of growth in past years. From a 15 per cent share in knit exports, Tirupur’s knitwear industry reached a 51 per cent share by just 2000. Also known as the t-shirt city, Tirupur’s commercial success can be attributed to its reliance on small to medium enterprises as well as a flexible production system which allows small individual units to participate. A lot of these factors ended up attracting a huge number of women even from surrounding regions to migrate to the textile hub and knitwear capital to earn a living.