Panipat is an ancient and historic city in the Panipat district, state of Haryana, India.
The city lies 90 km north of Delhi and 169 km south of Chandigarh. The city is famous in India by the name of “City of Weavers” although the nick name gives a far too glamurous image to fand the grip reality of its day to day business is:
Panipat is the global centre of “Shoddy Yarn”, and as a consequence and in combination with its wool blanket industry, the world’s centre for the production of cheap, chearful, soon-to-fall-apart wool blankets.
It is no coincidence that ‘shoddy‘, originally the English term for ‘yarn or fabric made from the shredded fiber of waste woolen cloth or clippings‘ as acquired a more colloquial meaning: ‘Badly made or done‘.
The Panipat shoddy industry sources its ‘raw material’from international worn clothing market. These quantities stem from the some 15% to 20% of used clothing which has no further use to charity shops or clothing recyclers, for on reason or another.
The numbers are, as can be seen in the graphic to the right, staggering. When in 2006/7 some 22,028 tonnes of used clothing were imported for shoody production, this number grew to 37,000 tonnes in 2007/8, and then nearly 6 times that (218,698 tonnes) in 2008/9. It can ne savely assumed that the quantities have grown further since.
The Rag Route to and From Panipat ((c) ‘Old clothes spin a new yarn in India’, by Maitreyee Handique)This ‘useless clothing is torn, re-spun and the recycled yarn is woven into poor quality cloth and blankets for the domestic market (85%, many of which sound for between 5 and 20 Rupees) and for export (15%). It is a business that is worth 1 billion dollars world wide.
Panipat supplies over 90% of the shoddy-wool relief blankets bought by international aid agencies for use in global disasters. These have been used in the past in geographies such as Pakistan, Tanzania, Sudan, Haiti etc.
So far so pretty.
But the industry has a vast, largely unknown shadow footprint in more aspect than one.
For starters, it is an entirely unregulated industry that employes by conservative estimates at least 70,000 people. Most would not satisfy minimum ethical standards applied to the manufacture of consumer goods by responsible companies anywhere.
“Whole factories run on subcontracted labour hired by jobbers working to quotas, and workers do not receive minimum employment benefits, do not have the right to associate and have no job security. They work in poor environmental conditions, use old machinery, often with dangerous working practices such as mending moving parts, and suffer respiratory problems from exposure to fibres, dust and chemicals. On average, a man working in a shoddy spinning mill earns c. Rs 180/day, or $3-3.50 for a 12-hour shift before advances and obligatory deductions etc. Women cutters earn up to Rs70 ($1.40) a day before deductions for an 8-hour shift. There is no obvious evidence of child labour, but babies and young children often accompany their mothers to the cutting floor for the day.” (Source: Lucy Norries, ‘Worn Clothing‘)
Video: Unravel – A documentary about Panipat (Trailer) by SoulRebel Films
What is rarely known, also, is that many of these ‘recycled’ garments actually arrived in India in perfectly wearable, if not even new, conditions. However, India prohibits the import of (used) clothing sutiable to wear, as a consequence of which the supply chain knows a ‘slashing’ process, usually taking place in one of the special economic zones at the port of entry, and before the ‘raw material’ is shipped to Panipat.
Video: Panipat – Global Centre of wool recycling and the Shoddy Industry
And finally, and to make matters worse: The shoddy industry is a living graveyard of western textile machinery. No one in the shoddy industry spends a penny on health and safety, or security for that matter. And while the workers themselves generally agree that their fate could have been much worse (e.g. working in one of the steele works), severe injuries and burns caused by old, and difficult to maintain equipment are common.
