Textile industry: cotton, jute and the new textile parks

Detail

Why the textile industry matters

• The textile industry turns natural or man-made fibre into yarn, cloth and finished goods such as garments, bags and carpets.
• It gives a large share of India's industrial output, jobs and export earnings.
• NCERT calls it the only industry in India that is self-reliant and complete across the value chain. The value chain is every step from raw material to finished product: fibre → yarn → fabric → processing (dyeing, printing) → garments and other high-value goods (NCERT Fig. 6.1).
• Current data (Ministry of Textiles):
• Textiles and apparel give about 2.3% of GDP, 13% of industrial production and 12% of exports [2].
• It is the second-largest employer after agriculture. It gives direct jobs to over 45 million people, and many of them are women and rural workers [2].
• Textile exports were US$ 34.4 billion in 2023-24. Apparel made up 42% of this [2].
• India is the 6th-largest exporter of textiles and apparel in the world (Economic Survey 2024-25) [3].

Cotton textile industry

Cotton as a raw material

• Cotton grows well on the black soil (regur) of the Deccan Lava Plateau. This soil holds moisture, and the crop needs it.
• India has the largest cotton area in the world [2].
• India is the 2nd-largest producer and consumer of cotton. It grows about 24% of the world's cotton [2].

History, step by step

• Before modern industry: cotton was spun by hand and woven on handlooms (looms worked by hand at home).
• Colonial setback:
• Britain sent cheap machine-made cloth from the mills of Lancashire (Manchester).
• Indian hand-made cloth could not compete on price.

• Many handloom weavers lost their work.

• First successful mill: Mumbai, 1854. It was set up by Cowasji Nanabhai Davar.

• Trap: an earlier mill at Fort Gloster near Kolkata (1818) failed. So Mumbai 1854 is the first successful mill.

• Both World Wars (1914-18, 1939-45): the army needed a lot of cloth, and imports from Britain fell. Indian mills grew fast.

Why early mills grew in the Maharashtra-Gujarat cotton belt

Factor	How it helped
Raw cotton	The black-soil cotton fields of Maharashtra and Gujarat were close by
Market	There was large demand in Mumbai, nearby towns and abroad
Port	Mumbai port brought in machinery and sent out cloth and yarn
Labour	Workers came in from the Konkan and the interior
Moist (humid) climate	Damp air stops cotton threads from becoming dry and snapping during spinning, so less yarn breaks
Capital	Mumbai merchants and the banks there put money into mills

Spinning vs weaving: a structural problem

• Spinning (making yarn from fibre) is centralised. It is concentrated in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
• Weaving (making cloth from yarn) is decentralised, which means it is spread over many small units. It happens in three sectors:
• handloom (hand-worked looms at home)
• powerloom (small units with electric looms)

• mills (large factories)

• Result: India makes good yarn, but much of its cloth is of lower quality. A lot of yarn is exported, and imported fabric fills the gap at the top end.

Later spread of the industry (dispersal)

• Why it spread:
• Electricity reached the interior.
• Railways linked cotton areas with markets.
• Labour was cheaper in the interior.

• Mills wanted to be closer to buyers.

• Main centres:

• Ahmedabad (Gujarat): "Manchester of India"
• Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu): often called the "Manchester of South India"
• Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh): often called the "Manchester of the North"
• Indore (Madhya Pradesh)
• Solapur (Maharashtra)

Khadi

• Khadi is cloth that is hand-spun and hand-woven. Gandhi made it the symbol of swadeshi, which means using Indian-made goods instead of British imports. The charkha (spinning wheel) was the tool of this movement.
• It is a cottage industry (made at home, using family labour and simple tools), so it gives jobs at home in villages.
• It is supported by the KVIC (Khadi and Village Industries Commission). KVIC is a statutory body, which means it was created by a law: the KVIC Act of 1956. It started work in 1957.

Jute textile industry

Basic facts

• Jute is called the "golden fibre". It is a long, shiny fibre used for sacks, hessian cloth, ropes and carpet backing.
• The crop needs a hot, humid climate and fresh alluvial soil that is flooded every year. That is why it grows in the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta (West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Odisha, Meghalaya).
• India is the largest producer of raw jute and jute goods. It is the second-largest exporter, after Bangladesh.
• Output in FY 2025-26: 76 lakh bales of raw jute and 12.80 lakh tonnes of jute goods [4].
• Jobs:
• about 3.70 lakh workers in organised mills and diversified jute units [4]
• about 40 lakh farm families who grow jute [4]

First mill

• The first jute mill opened at Rishra, near Kolkata, in 1855.

Why the mills line the Hugli

• The Hugli is a distributary of the Ganga. A distributary is a branch that leaves the main river. The Hugli flows south past Kolkata and enters the Bay of Bengal.
• Most mills sit in a narrow belt along both banks of the Hugli, about 98 km long and 3 km wide (NCERT).

Location factor	Detail
Raw material	Jute fields of the delta are nearby; raw jute is bulky, so mills stay close to it
Transport	Cheap water transport on the Hugli, backed by railways and roads
Water	Plenty of water to process raw jute
Labour	Cheap workers from West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh
Finance and port	Kolkata gave banking, insurance and a port for exports

Partition shock (1947)

• The mills stayed in India, in the Hugli belt.
• But about three-fourths of the jute-growing area went to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
• Result: Indian mills ran short of raw jute.
• India then expanded jute farming in West Bengal, Assam and Bihar.
• Bangladesh later became India's main rival in jute exports.

Problems and policy response

• Competition from synthetics: cheap plastic and nylon bags have replaced jute sacks in many uses.
• Competition from other countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, the Philippines, Egypt and Thailand.
• Jute Packaging Materials (Compulsory Use in Packaging Commodities) Act, 1987:
• It lists which goods must be packed in jute, and how much of each.
• Current rule: 100% of foodgrains and 20% of sugar must be packed in jute bags [4].
• The Government buys jute sacks worth about ₹12,000 crore every year to pack foodgrains. This gives jute farmers and workers a guaranteed market [4].

Cotton vs jute: location at a glance

Feature	Cotton textiles	Jute textiles
First mill	Mumbai, 1854	Rishra (near Kolkata), 1855
Core region	Maharashtra-Gujarat cotton belt, later spread widely	Hugli belt, West Bengal
Pattern	Spread out (dispersed)	Highly concentrated
Pull factor	Market and humid climate, with raw material	Raw material and water transport
Effect of Partition	Small	Lost about three-fourths of the jute area

Tiruppur knitwear cluster

• Tiruppur is a city in western Tamil Nadu, on the Noyyal river, a tributary of the Kaveri. It is India's main centre for cotton knitwear: T-shirts, innerwear and baby clothes made from knitted (looped, not woven) fabric.
• A cluster is a group of many firms in one place that do linked work. In Tiruppur this means knitting, dyeing, printing and stitching units.
• Scale: Tiruppur employs over 5 lakh people and gives about 22% of India's garment exports [7].
• Pollution problem, step by step:
• Dyeing and bleaching units released coloured, salty waste water into the Noyyal.
• The river water and the farmland downstream were damaged.

• The court ordered ZLD (Zero Liquid Discharge). Under ZLD, a factory treats and reuses all its waste water and releases none into rivers.

• Court orders:

• The Madras High Court first ordered ZLD in 2006 [7].

• In 2011 it ordered polluting units to close, so ZLD had to be enforced (NCERT-derived note: court-ordered ZLD in 2011).

• Common plants:

• Most units were small, so groups of them built shared CETPs (Common Effluent Treatment Plants).
• These plants use chemical and biological treatment and RO (reverse osmosis), which pushes water through a fine filter to remove salts [7].

• Of 760 dyeing units, 430 were working [7].

• Central support: the Centre gave ₹200 crore to Tiruppur dyeing units. These units had built the first ZLD projects in the country and were close to shutting because of the cost [8].

PM MITRA parks (2023)

• PM MITRA stands for PM Mega Integrated Textile Region and Apparel parks.
• "Integrated" means the whole value chain sits in one park: spinning, weaving, processing, garmenting and export support.

• It follows the '5F' vision: Farm → Fibre → Factory → Fashion → Foreign [6].

• Approved in March 2023: 7 parks, with an outlay of ₹4,445 crore over 7 years, up to 2027-28 [5].

• The seven sites [5]:

State	Site
Tamil Nadu	Virudhunagar
Telangana	Warangal
Gujarat	Navsari
Karnataka	Kalaburagi
Madhya Pradesh	Dhar
Uttar Pradesh	Lucknow
Maharashtra	Amravati

• Expected gains per park: about ₹10,000 crore of investment (Indian and foreign) and about 3 lakh direct and indirect jobs [6].
• Spatial logic of the sites:
• Amravati, Warangal, Kalaburagi and Dhar are in or near cotton-growing black-soil areas.
• Navsari and Virudhunagar are close to ports and existing clusters: Surat, and Tiruppur-Madurai.

Other textile centres

• Surat (Gujarat): synthetic (man-made fibre) textiles
• Ludhiana (Punjab): hosiery (knitted wear such as socks and vests) and woollens
• Panipat (Haryana): recycled textiles (made from old cloth) and handloom furnishings
• Bhadohi (Uttar Pradesh): hand-knotted carpets

Prelims Hooks

• First successful cotton mill: Mumbai, 1854. The earlier Fort Gloster mill (Kolkata, 1818) failed.
• First jute mill: Rishra, near Kolkata, 1855, on the Hugli.
• "Manchester of India" = Ahmedabad. Not Mumbai, and not Kanpur.
• A humid climate helps cotton spinning because less yarn breaks.
• Cotton spinning is centralised (Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu). Weaving is decentralised (handloom, powerloom, mill).
• Jute: India is the largest producer and the second exporter after Bangladesh.
• JPM Act 1987: 100% of foodgrains and 20% of sugar must be packed in jute [4].
• India: largest cotton area, 2nd-largest cotton producer, about 24% of world cotton [2]. 6th-largest textile and apparel exporter [3].
• PM MITRA site-state pairs: Virudhunagar–TN, Warangal–Telangana, Navsari–Gujarat, Kalaburagi–Karnataka, Dhar–MP, Lucknow–UP, Amravati–Maharashtra. Trap: none in West Bengal or Punjab.
• Tiruppur–Noyyal river–Tamil Nadu: knitwear, and India's first large ZLD dyeing cluster [8].

Mains Points

• Location shift in cotton:
• Early mills tied to raw material, port and climate (Mumbai) → dispersal to the market and the interior (Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, Kanpur, Indore).
• Electricity, rail and cheap labour drove this.

• Cotton is a "footloose-ish" industry: its raw material does not lose much weight in processing, so it can locate in many places.

• Jute's concentration and weakness:

• The Hugli belt combines raw material, water transport, cheap labour and Kolkata's finance.
• Partition cut off about three-fourths of the jute area.
• Synthetics and Bangladesh are rivals.

• The State steps in through the JPM Act and about ₹12,000 crore of yearly sack purchases [4].

• Structural gap and policy fix:

• Strong spinning but scattered, low-quality weaving.

• PM MITRA (₹4,445 crore, 7 parks, 5F) aims to bring the whole value chain into one place, near both raw material and ports [5][6].

• Environment vs livelihood (GS-III):

• Tiruppur's dye waste damaged the Noyyal.
• The court-ordered ZLD, the shared treatment plants and ₹200 crore of central aid show a model for cleaning up polluting clusters [7][8].