Approach any of these plants and you'll see a green landscape, with plush lawns and trees. Inside, the workers canteens are clean. Some workers are even served juice free with their lunches. At least one creche with attendants to look after workers' children is to be found.
Workers clad in overcoats and aprons to protect them from hazardous chemicals bustle around. They get periodical medical check ups, medical insurance and 24-hour medical care courtesy a nurse and a doctor.
An IT company's workplace in Bangalore? Not quite. These are textile mills, once seen as squalid and dilapidated places to work in. P N Samant, president of the Kamgarahadi union and the brother of the late fiery union leader Datta Samant, recalls that the textile industry did not exactly treat workers well or fulfill its social obligations.
The exploitation of children and of women was rampant, he says. Today labour is exploited only in powerlooms and process houses. "Over all, the compliance is better," he adds.
Siddharth Bothra, a textile industry analyst at the Mumbai-based Alchemy Shares and Stockbrokers, endorses the point. " I have visited the plants of almost all the big players in the industry. Barring the sorting of cotton which still requires some child labour, mills comply with their statutory regulations."
A quiet revolution has been sweeping through the textiles industry in the last few years -- the industry's 15 million employees have seen a sea-change in workplace standards.
Explains an executive at an export promotion council related to the industry: "Textile companies started meeting their statutory obligations to employees and restructuring the organisation (ramping up production capacities and so on) a couple of years ago. The fruits of these initiatives are visible now. "
Ravi Prabhakar, vice president (products) at Arvind Fashions, a part of the Gujarat-based Arvind Mills, says that his company has tied up with a handful of hospitals and foots the medical bills of workers, apart from complying with all the statutory requirements.
A spokesperson for Welspun India notes that the company's Mediclaim policy covers the family members of the workers as well. B Ravi, vice president at the Ashima group, points out that Asima mills have green lawns, trees and a pollution-free environment.
What's prompting all this is not a recently-developed social consciousness among India's textile barons but an economic opportunity that's opening out for them.
In January 2005, the quota system and quantitative restrictions on exports will be abolished. As a result, says a Confederation of Indian Industries study, the domestic textiles and apparel industry will grow by a compound annual growth rate of 6-8 per cent.
So Indian textile exporters will face huge outsourcing opportunities. One snag: textile companies in the West demand a good, clean work environment and attention to workers' problems.
Mill workers, no doubt, are silently hurrahing all this.
