When India’s Ministry of Textiles unveiled its four-point action plan recently, it wasn’t just another policy announcement it was a blueprint for an industry at a crossroads. With textile and apparel exports stagnating at $37.7 billion in FY2024-25, the government’s ambition to nearly triple it to $100 billion by 2030 signals a decisive move to reclaim India’s historical dominance in global fabrics and fashion trade.

The Blueprint: Three horizons, one vision

The Ministry’s roadmap divides reforms across three temporal horizons: short-term (two years), medium-term (five years), and long-term (beyond 2030), to tackle structural bottlenecks that have kept Indian textiles less competitive than China, Bangladesh, or Vietnam.

Table: India’s textile action blueprint (2025-30)

Cost Rationalization: Stitching efficiency into the supply chain

The first pillar of reform centers on production cost optimization. Textile clusters in Surat, Tirupur, and Panipat face cost structures 15-20 per cent higher than Asian peers due to fragmented logistics and outdated energy systems. The government plans to:

• Integrate 20 textile parks under the PM MITRA initiative with digital logistics corridors.

• Offer interest subvention for green power adoption in dyeing and spinning units.

• Establish common effluent treatment facilities (CETPs) to reduce compliance overheads.

The government’s three-phase plan lays out a sequenced reform blueprint. In the short term, India is focused on reducing operational costs mainly through supply chain integration and logistics efficiency. The medium-term goal turns inward to labour and technology, focusing on boosting worker productivity and automation to make Indian factories more globally competitive. The long-term vision shifts from volume to value repositioning India’s export profile toward premium categories like technical textiles, performance wear, and fashion apparel, which yield higher margins and global brand recognition.

Table: Cost competitiveness (2025 baseline)

Source: Ministry of Textiles, Industry Estimates, 2025

This comparison exposes India’s structural cost disadvantage within Asia. Indian textile exporters spend more on logistics and energy both key input costs. Logistics alone consumes 11 per cent of export value, compared to 7-8 per cent in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Similarly, power tariffs remain among the region’s highest. This explains why India’s textile margins are squeezed despite cheaper labour. If the short-term cost rationalization plan (like integrated parks and green energy incentives) succeeds, India could narrow this 15-20 per cent cost gap by FY2027, making its exports far more competitive in global markets.

Workforce and automation, the loom of the future

In the medium term, the plan targets labour productivity an area where India lags significantly. According to a Deloitte-Textile Federation report, Bangladesh’s apparel worker produces 25 per cent more garments per shift than an Indian worker, largely due to better line balancing and digital workflow systems.

Key measures:

• A Skill Acceleration Mission to upskill two million workers in lean manufacturing and technical textile operations.

• 50 per cent capital subsidy for adopting digital cutting and stitching equipment.

• Expansion of AI-driven quality control systems under the Samarth 2.0 program.

Table: Productivity benchmarking (2025)

India’s apparel workforce currently lags behind Asian peers in both manual output and automation adoption. An average Indian worker produces 40 garments per shift which is, 20-30 per cent less than counterparts in Bangladesh or Vietnam. Automation is another weak link: only 28 per cent of production lines use automated or semi-automated systems, versus 60 per cent in China. The government’s medium-term aim is to raise automation to 60 per cent by 2030, effectively doubling current levels and boosting worker output by at least 50 per cent. The strategy blends digital adoption with human skill enhancement targeting AI-assisted stitching, digital cutting, and lean line balancing to lift overall productivity and global reliability. The goal now is to close the productivity gap by 2030 while retaining India’s cost advantage.

Export Competitiveness: Building brand India textiles

The long-term horizon looks beyond cost to brand equity. The ministry aims to shift 40 per cent of exports from basic yarn and fabrics to high-value apparel and technical textiles, aligning with global sustainability and traceability standards.

Initiatives under discussion: Launch of Fabric of India export branding program akin to Make in India; mandatory traceability QR codes for exports to the EU under the new carbon border adjustment mechanism; Textile Innovation Fund to support 200 startups in bio-based fibres and circular fashion.

The road to 2030

The Textile Ministry’s strategy is more than a reform agenda it’s a manufacturing reset. The short-term cost cuts, medium-term skill pushes, and long-term brand repositioning combine into a coherent growth map. But execution remains key. As one senior textile exporter from Tirupur notes, “Blueprints don’t make exports—ecosystems do.”

The crux is that India’s textile industry, once the fabric of global trade, is attempting to rewrite its story with data-driven precision. The four-point action plan is not merely about hitting export numbers it’s about restoring India’s reputation as the world’s textile powerhouse, one stitch of competitiveness at a time.