India’s booming fashion industry is a climate nightmare that demands clean-up action right away

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Globally, fashion accounts for 10% of annual carbon emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Every year, the world produces 92 million tonnes of textile waste, with less than 1% recycled into new garments. India is expanding production capacity even as evidence emerges that making clothes more efficiently cannot offset making vastly more of them.

The prevailing narrative in India treats sustainability as an accessory. Deploy some solar panels, use some recycled polyester, promote a few ethical brands, and the problem fixes itself. That story is not just incomplete, it is misleading. Efficiency improvements reduce emissions per garment, but when total garment production accelerates sharply, overall emissions still rise.

Research tracking the environmental footprint of fashion consistently finds that volume growth swallows efficiency gains. India’s domestic clothing consumption is growing at roughly 10-12% annually, far outpacing mature markets. Fast fashion formats are penetrating our smaller cities speedily, driven by affordability and novelty rather than apparel durability or scope for reuse.

We still have a narrow window to avoid the mistakes that rich markets made and are now struggling to reverse. But we must confront three realities that few talk about.

The first is coal. A large share of emissions in Indian textile-making comes from coal-fired boilers used for dyeing and finishing fabrics. Moving to electric boilers and heat pumps is both technically feasible and economically viable with proper financial structures, as research by the Apparel Impact Institute shows. Yet coal persists because it is cheap, familiar and weakly regulated in dispersed manufacturing zones.

Without a clear time-bound phase-down backed by concessional finance and tariff reforms that make electrification affordable for small manufacturers, this source of carbon emissions will likely remain locked in for decades. Cleaner options exist, but they will not be adopted at scale through voluntary commitments.

The second reality is overproduction. Fast fashion’s business model is built on making far more than what consumers need, then clearing excess inventory through deep discounts. This is not a side effect of growth, but the organizing logic. As long as overproduction remains untouched, energy savings and material innovations will never be sufficient.

India needs to move beyond voluntary sustainability reporting and require large brands and e-commerce platforms to disclose and reduce unsold inventory, returns and sell-through rates. Treating overproduction as a regulated climate risk, not merely a retail inconvenience, would force alignment between production and genuine demand rather than speculative supply and endless churn.

The third reality is that India’s fashion industry cannot decarbonize one factory at a time. The sector employs over 45 million people and is dominated by small and medium enterprises clustered in various hubs. Roughly 80% of the industry operates in these clusters. A firm-by-firm regulatory approach will fracture compliance.

Decarbonization must be organized around clusters with shared infrastructure for renewable energy, common waste and water treatment and pooled financing. Critically, this must include explicit job protection and reskilling programmes. Without such safeguards, the transition will provoke political resistance and may stall before we can make meaningful progress.

Some argue that market forces and rising consumer awareness will steer the industry toward sustainability, making regulation unnecessary. That view misreads fashion market behaviour.

In smaller cities, where demand growth is highest, purchase decisions are driven by the appeal of prices and trends. Green awareness is concentrated among affluent urban consumers who represent a small fraction of today’s market’s expansion.

Others claim that global buyers demanding cleaner supply chains will drive change. But export pressure is partial and inconsistent. Export-led decarbonization also risks creating a two-speed industry: clean for foreign markets, dirty for domestic consumption. That bifurcation will keep national emission reductions slow by leaving the bulk of the industry unchanged.

India’s fashion story need not become a climate disaster because the country still has an advantage that Europe and North America lost decades ago. Our apparel market and industrial base are still being built and consumer habits are not yet fully entrenched. Industrial clusters are not locked into high-carbon infrastructure. We could embed climate discipline into this phase of growth rather than trying to retrofit it later at vastly higher cost and against fiercer resistance.

The choice we face is stark. India can shape the industry now, while options remain open, or wait to encounter a much harder reckoning once emissions get locked in, competitive pressures intensify and political room for manoeuvre shrinks. The fashion boom is an economic opportunity, but only if hard choices are made before momentum calcifies into inertia.

The author is an independent expert based in New Delhi, Kolkata and Odisha. Twitter: @scurve Instagram: @soumya.scurve.