Sui Dhaaga and textile economics: Can the handloom romantics uplift the poor?
There is a strangely striking and eerie scene in the movie Sui Dhaaga. In a cocktail after-party, team Sui Dhaaga, from an unknown Indian village, is sweltering under elite indifference, even after a stellar textile display. The fashion moguls there tell them that in spite of being talented, team Sui Dhaaga hardly has connections, and can barely cater to the large market demand that’s essential to grow.
If you are a clever observer, you will also notice that the team — who have spun the best of handloom textile — are themselves clad in cheap machine-made synthetic clothes, even at an award ceremony.
In the real world, beyond Bollywood’s happily-ever-after-optimism, handloom — much like unorganised manufacturing — in India employs on average less than 5 people an organisation, suffers from numerous diseconomies of scale, and hardly ever grows big.
Handloom — no matter how romanticised by Gandhi’s spinning wheel, the Swadeshi movement, Sushmita Sen’s 1994 award-winning Miss India answer to the legacy of the Nehruvian couture — or its revival through Fabindia or the new age designers — has little to no correlation with large scale upliftment of the poor.
There is of course a national identity attached with the spinning wheel in our Tricolour and a history of self-reliance that we cannot detach, but let’s not forget that every competitive country also needs to export finished products — and that too on a large scale — in order to survive in a global economy.
That is, to survive not only by hand-holding by niche designers in Mumbai, Delhi or Kolkata, but organically through income growth, efficiency, skill development and inter-generational mobility that many large scale international production houses can provide.
Starting from our neighbour Bangladesh, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan are glaring examples of countries that have progressed from low-skilled manufacturing in textile and footwear to currently reaching a state where they beat India in many major economic and social indicators.
To recall, Bangladesh’s life expectancy at birth is 72 years compared to India’s 68. Vietnam stands at 76. The percentage of women in the labour force in India is 24%, compared to Bangladesh’s 29% and Vietnam’s 49%.
It’s not that that the question of reviving India’s low skilled manufacturing sector has not come up in the Indian policy debate. But very little of definitive changes have been implemented on ground.
Following the declaration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ policy in 2014, the Economic Survey of India has year-on-year covered this topic with numerous quotes, references and footnotes from several studies by Dani Rodrik and Ricardo Hausmann – two of Harvard Kennedy School’s living pioneers in manufacturing and trade economics.
But the resultant change in indigenous policy making has been rather bleak.
The 2014- 2015 Economic Survey, for example, begins with the promising quote by Lee Kuan Yew — “Since industrial revolution, no country has become a major economy without becoming an industrial power” — and that if the entire Indian economy were employed in registered manufacturing, India would be “as rich as say South Korea”. But the same report then goes on to a classic self-doubt mode by asking (but) — “What to Make in India?” — which then forms the title of the section and thereby leaves no concrete policy recommendation.
The 2015-2016 Economic Survey comes back to the same question by raising the new issue of preferential trade agreement as an obstacle for India to exchange its manufactured goods in the world market.
Lastly, the 2017-2018 Economic Survey ends with an even more pessimistic hypothesis, by raising the question that if there is a late convergence stall (often brought about by manufacturing growth or technological advancement) in economic development, and if India can escape it given its low level of skill and human capital.
While all of these are valid concerns, India needs to make a rigorous comparative assessment of its low-skilled manufacturing sector before giving up on it up for services.
The state might also want to pick winners among this sector and help them grow, like many of our South Asian counterparts.
Second, in the age of populism and rising trade wars, overcoming international treaties and free trade is difficult, but not impossible.
Third, what India needs to do in order to revive its manufacturing sector is undergo a major ideological shift, which will then mould the thinking process of policy-making in India. To elucidate, policy makers in India need to bring about a tectonic shift from the Gandhian thought of the “love for the small”.
There is no reason for a country, where people still die working as manual scavengers, to promote small handlooms and seamlessly demonise corporates as sweat-shops — just as in the movie Sui Dhaaga —whether in terms of labour cost, dignity or welfare.
What a liberal democracy like India, teeming with numerous civil society groups and NGOs, should do instead is to look for fair wage, good conditions for work and ample grievance redressal system in the corporate work environment.
The fourth and most difficult change is to bring about the process of social equity, which, unlike other countries, has not preceded the economic development process of India. This is one crucial step to break the disadvantages of caste, creed, religion and the related absence of social network, capital or status which many of the late developing countries had tried to achieve. This would provide the likes of team Sui Dhaaga to not only avoid some level of public humiliation, but also thrive with the rest.
As an immediate next step, we recommend that the country can do a little better by welcoming the market forces and not demonising them. India needs to build a vast interconnected network of industries and help them trade. Barely trusting the handloom romantics will take the country only a step backward, not forward. For, just as the banks which are too big to fail, unregistered handloom is just too small to grow.
Also read: Why Modi government is for sansyasis, not farmers