Analysis

Cotton is the raw material on which India's textile and apparel export ambitions rest, and for the second time in a year the government has moved to lower its cost for processors by removing import duties. The measure runs until late October this year. What it does not do is resolve the underlying tension between farm-income protection and industrial competitiveness that has made the duty a recurring site of policy conflict.

The just-launched Padma Doree initiative has been positioned as more than a fabric line, with Eri silk and Chanderi brought together inside a premium craft category that speaks of sustainability and artisan value, yet the claim will remain incomplete until the initiative shows who earns, who decides, who carries risk and whether the premium travels back to the loom through durable market demand.

The global apparel industry's sustainability reporting expanded substantially in the years following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster. A new study examining 322 reports from 69 companies over seven years jhas found that the expansion was real and the accountability was not. Environmental content consistently outranked labour conditions, and the sector's reporting tone became progressively more optimistic regardless of what was happening in the supply chains those reports described.

Thirteen years after Rana Plaza killed more than a thousand garment workers in Savar, the disaster is still generating money. The question survivors are now asking is where it goes. Recently, the Rana Plaza Survivors Association turned its demands away from brands and factory owners and toward the institutions that built campaigns, funding streams and organisational visibility around their suffering—and that, in survivors' view, have not been required to account to them for how those funds were used.