Fashion’s real answer lies on the farm

Most of us judge a garment by how it looks and what it costs. Very few ask where it began. A cotton shirt starts in a field, months before a designer sees the fabric, with a grower who settled questions of seed, water and soil the buyer will never hear of. The distance between that field and the shop counter is where India’s sustainability conversation has to move.

That chain sits at the centre of the country’s growth plan. The Prime Minister’s 5F vision runs from Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign, and few countries hold all five within their own borders. India does. We grow cotton, jute, silk, wool and linen, spin and weave them, and ship the result abroad as fashion. The sector employs over 45 million people directly, is targeted at 350 billion dollars by 2030 and carries an export ambition of 600 billion dollars by 2047.

The first F is where progress has been slowest. Cotton here is grown largely on small holdings, much of it rain dependent, by farmers whose input costs rise faster than what they are paid. Yields have flattened, and the rest of the chain has modernised around a farm gate that has not.

Better farming is, therefore, not a corporate social responsibility line item. It is raw material strategy. Crop rotation, drip irrigation, a lighter chemical load and attention to soil carbon cut a grower’s costs before they cut anyone’s footprint. The honest test of a regenerative programme is whether farm incomes rose. If they did not, it will not survive a poor season, and no certificate will rescue it.

Set against this is the material the industry leaned on instead. Polyester is PET, a petroleum derivative and the default answer to volume for years, and recycled polyester from used beverage bottles is now offered as its conscience. Taking a bottle that could have gone back into a bottle and turning it into a T shirt breaks one loop rather than closing another, and the garment has nowhere to go afterwards. Blends make it worse. Once polyester is spun with cotton, nothing at commercial scale here separates the two again, and the country’s commonest fabric becomes a dead end. The cheapness is borrowed too, since polyester is priced off crude and carries none of the cost of its disposal, a bill that lands on municipalities.

Recycled content also settles nothing about what a synthetic garment does in use. It sheds microscopic fibres in ordinary washing, and researchers have found microplastics in human tissue. Reusing PET cuts demand for fresh fossil feedstock, which counts for something. It does not stop the shedding.

Genuine circularity asks whether a garment can be repaired, resold, and its fibre recovered years later. Above all it asks whether anyone thought about recovery at the design stage. Recycled content is a percentage on a label. Circularity is a decision taken long before the garment exists, and we have been better at labels than at decisions.

None of this is new thinking. Long before circularity acquired a vocabulary, an Indian household ran on it. A sari passed to a daughter, then became a quilt, then a floor cloth. Clothes moved down through a family and out to the next one, mended rather than replaced.

The idea that a material has more than one life is not a European regulation arriving on our shores. It is an old habit we stopped valuing somewhere between the mill and the mall.

It is also becoming a condition of trade. The European Union’s Digital Product Passport applies to textiles from 2027 and 2028, and every garment sold there must carry verified data on material origin, chemical inputs and recyclability. For an exporter who buys in yarn and fabric, tracing that back is near impossible. For a country holding all five Fs, it is a matter of will.

For the shopper none of this need be complicated. Expect a garment to last and buy on that basis. Read the fibre content as carefully as the price. Wash cooler and less often. Keep what you have in use, and pass it on as your grandmother did without calling it sustainability. Responsible consumption and responsible production are one system seen from two ends, and neither moves while the other stands still. The choice made at the counter travels a long way back down the chain. It ends on a farm.

The author is Chief Sustainability Officer,