CAN WORKERS RESET THE SYSTEM?

The city of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu is known as the knitting capital of India. Thousands of garment factories, which make clothes for the domestic market and for export, co-exist with garment districts full of homeworkers. Some workshops just stitch on buttons, other households snip loose threads before pressing and packaging clothes ready for sale. With its sewing machines rattling through the day, textile agents going from house to house, rickshaw drivers blowing their horns, and children running underfoot, Tirupur is known as a busy industrial city.

The signs that something was not right began in January 2020. Homeworkers – always sensitive to the slightest shift in domestic and global markets – found that both contracts and access to raw materials had begun to reduce. By March, there was no work whatsoever.

The once bustling streets of Tirupur fell silent.

‘Homeworkers expected things were going to get worse, but nobody expected this,’ explained Janhavi Dave, International