Production country
India
India is the world’s second-largest textile and apparel producer, employing over 45 million workers directly across fragmented supply chains dominated by SMEs and informal work. Labour Codes introduced in 2025 aim to simplify regulation and strengthen protections. However, risks persist around low wages, violence and harassment, discrimination, and insecure employment, particularly in the unorganised sector.
India is the world’s second-largest producer of textiles and apparel, employing over 45 million workers directly across all levels of production—from cotton farming to ready-made garment manufacturing. Despite its global significance, the Indian textile sector is charecterised by extreme fragmentation, with the unorganised segment and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) being most dominant. In late 2025, India replaced 29 labour laws with four unified Labour Codes. These changes aim to simplify compliance, expand social security, and redefine wage and safety standards. For labor-intensive sectors like textiles, this means new challenges and opportunities in workforce management, cost planning, production scheduling, and worker welfare. These new Codes intend to balance worker protections with easier business processes. Risks around workplace violence and harassment, discrimination and living wages remain common in the country. Especially in the unorganised segment, known for hiring a substantial portion of India's workforce, risks around wages below the lagal minimum, absence of employment stability, and exploitation within the workplace are high.
Accounts for roughly 4% of global trade in textiles and apparel and ranks among the largest exporters worldwide.
45 million estimated garment and textile workers
239
Factories Fair Wear members source from
36
Fair Wear member brands sourcing from the country
What Fair Wear is doing
How we work locally with partners to address risks and improve working conditions.
Due diligence requires companies to know what is happening in their supply chain. Fair Wear has state of the art risk tools that support brands with identifying and tracking their most urgent risks. In India, external partners offer extensive risk identification and validation services based on Fair Wear methodologies. Companies can access detailed, stakeholder-validated country risk information and request Fair Wear's Onsite Assessments (Full, Modular and Validation). Companies can also request custom HREDD facilitation support, such as verification activities.
Insight only creates change when you act on it. Fair Wear equips brands with a set of established training modules to raise awareness, address root causes and implement In India, companies can request the Fair Wear Onboarding Training for suppliers and workers, which focuses on awareness-raising on workers' rights and support for social dialogue between workers and management. The Fair Wear Fair Price support visit offers hands-on support with implementation of the Fair Price app, a practical tool for estimating labour costs and building fact-based pricing conversations with suppliers. The Fair Wear Violence and Harassment Prevention Programme adresses workplace standards and violence prevention and supports with the creation of functioning factory-level anti-harassment committees. Moreover, companies can request HREDD-related training such as a Supervisory capacity building training for women workers.
Staying ahead of risks means knowing about them before they escalate. Fair Wear's grievance mechanism is available in Hindi, Tamil, Bangla, Kannada and Odiya ensuring workers can raise concerns in their own language. The mechanism provides an accessible, confidential channel, with findings feeding into Fair Wear's work with brands and suppliers to address root causes.
Fair Wear brings the right people to the table in India through our extensive stakeholder network. We collaborate with a wide network of local organisations, bringing together industry and worker representation to advance working conditions and strengthen social dialogue across the sector.