India's Looming Crisis
India's textile industry is contracting after several years of almost double digit growth, Forbes reports. About 35 million people are employed through India's textile industry. It is second only to agriculture in size and has become a symbol of a burgeoning middle class.
Many workers had been earning nearly $4 per day. This afforded families the opportunity to send their children to private schools, offering them a future beyond physical labor. The economic crisis has changed these positive trends, however. Wages have dropped by half or more, sending millions of workers below the poverty line. As a consequence, families have been forced to stop paying for important services like medical care and have even been forced to pull their children out of schools.
In an interview with Forbes, Ajay Chhibber, assistant secretary general of the U.N. Development Program in New York, explains the long-term ramifications.
This will affect a generation. A girl who drops out of school will be an illiterate mother the rest of her life... You had a financial crisis. It's now become an economic crisis. The next phase of this in 2009 will be a social crisis.
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Indian government prepares to take action against textile crisis
Reading this post I was surprised to learn how far the US (and now global) recession has penetrated India's emerging textile industry and the grave repercussions that could ensue. In a country as vast and diverse as India, change comes slowly, and these hard-fought gains that have lead to improvements in quality of life might take a generation to recover.
With this in mind I was surprised to find two articles regarding the Indian government - often the most dilatory entity in India - and their efforts to address the needs of the textile industry. This includes seeking fiscal measures such as tax write-offs and other incentives (http://www.hinduonnet.com/2009/05/06/stories/2009050650330200.htm) and sending an Indian delegation visited Tunisia recently to explore industry-level cooperation in textiles, focused on EU expansion (http://www.hinduonnet.com/2009/03/22/stories/2009032256491200.htm).
Perhaps some positive long-term change for the textile industry could come out of this. Unfortunately I fear the bulk of the weight lies on the Indian bureaucracy, which is notoriously muddled. Only time will tell...
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