INDIAN WEAVERS USE OLD TECH TO PROTECT ENVIRONMENT

India's cotton industry is polluting rivers and the environment, and workers are often underpaid. But traditional handlooms, chilli and natural dyes could make a difference, Deutsche Welle (DW) reported.

Nishanth Chopra, the 26-year-old entrepreneur behind Oshadi, grew up in the weaving town Erode, "around textiles, leather and spices." When he started his women's wear brand in 2016, he began to question how the industry treated both its artisans and the environment.

Not only are Indian textile workers frequently underpaid, but cotton farming in India consumes huge volumes of water, and fields given over to monoculture leach nutrients from the soil. Chemical dyes, meanwhile, pollute rivers and groundwater.

Moreover, in India, though only 5% of cultivable land is under cotton, the segment makes up 55% of the country's expenditure on agricultural pesticides. Initially, he worked with a cooperative of handloom weavers, but discovered that less than half of what he paid for the fabric was going to the weavers.

"I had to find other ways to pay the weavers a fair wage," he said.

So, he began working with the weavers directly and supported exceptional artisans by investing in their looms.

The next step was getting his dyers to switch to natural dyes, which he sourced and provided to dyers himself, with a guarantee that he would buy back the yarn at a premium price.

Working back to the source of the cotton itself, Oshadi helps farms to move away from monocropping and to regenerative, organic farming, which Chopra says is simply a return to how farming was done traditionally in India.

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