For over thirty years, Bajrang and Nirmala Phatak had a set routine. Like many people born and raised in Ichalkaranji, a picturesque town in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district, the couple’s lives orbited around cloth. Clacking looms in dimly lit single-room units governed the rhythms of their days. Since Ichalkaranji is a small town, they were never too far from each other. The factories they worked at were often less than a kilometre apart. 

Nirmala’s job demanded exacting attention. She wove cotton threads through the tiny eyelets of heddles—the looped wire or cords through which every thread in the warp goes before the passage of the weft. Her work hours tended to be consistent, six hours split across two shifts in the morning and evening. During her break, she would go home to cook for the family.  

Bajrang operated power loom shuttles, moving at a frenzied speed as the roaring machines carried yarn back and forth. His shifts were technically eight hours long, but these almost always extended to ten or twelve hours. Together, they brought home about 10,000 rupees at the end of the month. 

Theirs was an alliance that weathered many storms. In the nineties, when Bajrang was forced to shut down a factory within two years of starting it, they brushed aside their disappointment and sought employment in a nearby unit. As Bajrang and Nirmala’s family grew, so did their workload. They put in longer hours to support the education and weddings of their four children—three daughters and one son. 

Nothing, it seemed, could break their partnership. Then came the morning of 24 February 2022. 

The day began like any other as Nirmala intently wove threads into the rectangular warp. Suddenly, the dangling pallu of her sari got caught in the powerful motor of the loom. Before she could do anything, the machine sucked the fabric further in, tightening the noose around her neck. By the time Nirmala’s co-workers wrested her free, she had fallen to the ground, unconscious because of the strangulation.

The owners of the factory that Nirmala worked at took her to a government hospital, her 32-year-old son, Niranjan, recounted. “The government hospitals are not adequate here,” he said, “I was with her throughout the five days she was admitted. She didn’t get the attention she needed.” Nirmala passed away at the age of 54.

A little over a month later, Bajrang resumed the work that had claimed his wife’s life. “For the first six months, we were totally devastated,” Niranjan told me. “Especially my father. He didn’t speak much, he didn’t know what to do. He was just going through the motions.”

Since Nirmala’s death was caused by an accident at her workplace, her employers owed her family compensation. Under the century-old Employees Compensation Act of 1923—earlier known as the Workmen’s Compensation Act—an employer is either supposed to pay the family of a deceased worker an amount that is calculated by multiplying half the worker’s salary by what the Act refers to as “the relevant factor,”determined by the employee’s age, or Rs 1.2 lakh, whichever is higher. In Nirmala’s case, according to these stipulations, this amount would have worked out to a little over Rs 3.3 lakh. Her bosses refused to pay the family any money. 

“We were reeling under the loss of her life and the owners just made it worse,” Niranjan told me. “We didn’t know what to do.”

In Ichalkaranji, this is the distorted version of justice that the bereaved families of workers have to make their peace with.

This is when a labour union affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M)—one among four unions handling complaints related to workers’ accidents and deaths in Ichalkaranji—stepped in to build up pressure. The back-and-forth lasted for about a month until Nirmala’s employers budged and made an initial offer: 50,000 rupees. The union leaders got them to increase the amount to Rs 1.85 lakh. At this point, the family had two options. “We could settle and take the money,” Niranjan recalled, “Or we could take them to the labour court.” 

Much as Niranjan wanted to seek legal recourse, he realised it wasn’t the practical thing to do. His father and the union leaders agreed. “Court cases go on for years,” Niranjan said. “It requires money to fight the case. Who can afford that? ” (The factory at which Nirmala worked has since shut down; and its owner died because of cancer recently.)

About two months after Nirmala’s demise, her family accepted the settlement. “It seemed immoral to negotiate over my mother’s life,” Niranjan told me. “The whole thing seemed weird to me. But we needed money and we couldn’t let them get away with it either.” 

In Ichalkaranji, this is the distorted version of justice that the bereaved families of workers have to make their peace with.

OVER THE PAST several decades, Ichalkaranji has built a storied reputation for itself as one of India’s oldest and most prominent textile centres. The president of the Ichalkaranji Powerloom Weavers Co-operative Association estimated that the city is home to a smattering of handlooms and nearly one lakh power looms—of which 25,000 are advanced, shuttleless machines, 5,000 are semi-automatic and 70,000 are traditional power looms. According to him, the region manufactures 1.25 crore metres of cloth worth sixty crore rupees every day. 

The product travels far and wide, to countries abroad, including France and Italy. Back home, Asif Kurane—a senior journalist from Kolhapur—told me that it was used by renowned companies such as Raymond, Sudarshan Jeans, Arvind Limited and Tessitura Moni among others. The significance of the city’s textile industry was evident in 2012 when it featured in the budget speech of Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister at the time, as he announced an allocation of 70 crore rupees for the development of a power loom mega cluster in Ichalkaranji. Its residents appear to have reaped the dividends of its businesses. As of 2018, the city reportedly recorded one of the highest per capita incomes in the country.

But in December 2023, when Object visited Ichalkaranji, it was clear that this prosperity stands in stark contrast to the lot of the region’s textile workers. Their jobs are often fraught with danger, fair remuneration is hard to come by, and in some factories, even basic sanitation facilities are a luxury. 

The situation is even worse for those who suffer grievous injuries or for the families of those who lose their lives. The legal system rarely offers succour. It is near-impossible to pursue cases because of financial constraints and the informal nature of the work. The Manchester of Maharashtra, as Ichalkaranji is popularly known, earns its laurels from the exploitation of the workers who form the backbone of its textile industry.

THE ORIGINS OF Maharashtra’s contemporary textile sector can be traced back to the seventeenth century. For a long time, the region’s warm and humid weather supported the growth and easy availability of cotton.

The industry’s evolution went through frequent upheavals. Most of the initial mills in India  were built by the colonial regime in pursuit of profit. Farmers in Maharashtra were forced to mass-produce cotton, which was then exported to England only for the finished product to be sold back in India at inflated rates. 

“The number of cotton mills in India rose from 58 in 1880 to 79 in 1883, 193 in 1900, 271 in 1914, and 334 in 1929—mostly in Bombay and Ahmedabad,” the author Arup K Chatterjee noted in an article for The Hindu. “Before the outbreak of World War II, they employed 4,00,000 Indians. And this came about a little over a century after driving millions of homespun cotton weavers and craftsmen to mortal bankruptcy,” he wrote. 

In 1854, the businessman and banker Cowasji Nanabhai Davar became the first Indian to establish a textile mill, the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company. “He was supported in his venture by a British firm, Piatt Brothers of Oldham, with finances from fifty leading merchants of Bombay city supplementing his investment,” Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar wrote in their book One Hundred Years, One Hundred Voices, which chronicles the history of mill workers in Central Bombay. The book points out that this was also around the time during which the railway network started expanding, connecting the city to the rest of the country and facilitating the migration of workers from western Maharashtra—where Ichalkaranji falls—to the textile mills of Bombay. 

Through this period, workers’ movements emerged as a formidable force, not only in advocating fair wages and better conditions but also in supporting the Indian freedom struggle. Post independence, even as the coffers of factory owners swelled, workers asserted themselves against the exploitative practices that made such gains possible. 

Today, according to government figures, Maharashtra accounts for over ten percent of the country’s total textile and apparel production. It provides a near-equal share of the total employment in the sector. This growth is fuelled by a number of textile hubs, which include Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Ichalkaranji.

The seeds for Ichalkaranji’s success in the textile sector were sown in 1904. That year, a young entrepreneur called Vitthalrao Datar set up its first power loom. Datar worked under the patronage of Narayanrao Babasaheb Ghorpade, the region’s administrator from 1892 to 1943. According to a study published by Shivaji University—a state research institution based out of Kolhapur—Ghorpade’s visit to Denmark and other western countries gave him access to the cooperative sector there. This likely played a role in helping him recognise the potential of the textile industry early on, and he encouraged weavers in Ichalkaranji by providing them with free land as well as capital to start their businesses. 

Dhananjay Lipare, a senior journalist in Kolhapur, told me that this also led to the migration of people from other states to Ichalkaranji. “Today, it is like a microcosm of a metropolis because we have people with roots in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and many more states who have been here for generations,” he said. “But their first generation arrived because of the power looms. Ghorpade encouraged them as well.” Lipare added that the Ichalkaranji Urban Co-operative Bank—earlier known as the Ichalkaranji Central Co-operative Bank—which was established in 1929, helped the weavers get their initial capital. “That’s how the industry steadily grew,” he told me.

A little before India gained independence, according to the Shivaji University paper, Ichalkaranji had about 1,500 power looms. Alongside, the handloom industry of Ichalkaranji prospered too. Around the time of the second world war, “Ichalkaranji became well-known for its handloom saris”, the paper states. By the fifties, the number of power looms rose to 5,000. But there were still challenges to confront. “The owners started facing a problem of supply of yarn, which is the major raw material for this industry,” the paper notes. “The power loom industry then was dependent on yarn supply from Bombay and other states.” The regularity of supply and consistent quality emerged as key issues. 

This is when political leaders such as Abasaheb Kulkarni and Dattajirao Kadam worked with YB Chavan, then Maharashtra’s chief minister, to formulate a solution. In 1962, the Deccan Co-operative Spinning Mill was established in Ichalkaranji. 

Over the next few decades, as power looms flooded the markets, most factory owners gravitated towards the machines. Datta Mane, an eighty-year-old union leader affiliated with the CPI(M), was likely a part of the last generation that worked regularly with handlooms. “Until the 1980s, workers were treated fairly in Ichalkaranji,” he told me. “I comfortably looked after my family in the 1960s and ’70s by working in handlooms.” Initially, Mane recalled, most factories in the region produced saris. By the late seventies, Ichalkaranji’s looms started producing dhotis as well.

Soon, businessmen from the Marwari community in Rajasthan entered the region. “They learnt this trade from scratch, and today they own almost all the bigger power loom factories,” Mane said.

The widespread automation of the weaving process led to an emphasis on productivity and efficiency. The pressure on workers grew exponentially without a proportionate increase in their salaries.

In 2013, the power loom workers of Ichalkaranji came together for a historic 37-day-long strike, demanding better wages and working facilities. The strike “marked a rare example of unity among all the labour unions in the country”, a news report in The Hindu noted, while pointing out that only parties affiliated to the Left had supported the workers’ demands initially. But the ensuing spike in wages did not last long. “The employers enforced them for three years,” Mane told me. “But then, at some point after 2016-17, they went back to square one.”

Workers are no longer able to push for collective action as effectively. Over the past decade, as more and more residents from Ichalkaranji moved away from textile units, migrants from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar sought these jobs. “They are even more vulnerable so the employers don’t even show them on paper,” Mane said. “It is all informal, which opens them up to more exploitation.” Currently, women earn about 1,200 rupees per week, while the salary for men ranges from 2,000 rupees to 3,500 rupees. Barely anyone earns the monthly minimum wage mandated by the state government: 14,793 rupees.

As the yawning gap between the workers and their employers widened, the character of Ichalkaranji underwent a fundamental change. “This used to be a city where people looked after each other,” Mane told me.

NIRMALA WASN'T THE Nirmala wasn’t the first woman to have died at work in Ichalkaranji. It is unlikely that she will be the last.

Bhimrao Kamble, the labour representative of the union affiliated to CPI(M), estimated that over the past decade or so, at least four to five women had died in Ichalkaranji every year like Nirmala did, while about 15-20 men were wounded severely or lost their lives. “Common injuries include electric shocks, fingers or hands getting stuck in the shuttle, and eye injuries,” he told me. The workers are also exposed to a deafening level of sound—up to hundred decibels—which poses a severe threat to their hearing.

Basic necessities are dependent on the will of individual owners. Shobha Shinde, a 54-year-old woman who worked at several factories, told me that she couldn’t even think of using the washroom in most units where she was employed. “They were dirty, smelly and unhygienic,” she recalled. “Men can manage, but what do you do as a woman? I used to get on my two-wheeler and go home whenever I wanted to use a bathroom.”

Factories that accommodated two to four shuttles thirty years ago are now heaving with the presence of fourteen to sixteen such machines. There is scant space for the workers to operate. “They are running around too close to the machines and that’s why accidents keep  happening,” Sada Malabade, a union leader in his early fifties who is associated with the CPI(M) told me.
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Such exertion can exhaust a person even if they manage to be vigilant about external injuries. “Considering the area of the factory, a worker covers about thirty-five to forty kilometres every day by just running around,” said Swati Ganpatye, a thirty-year-old resident of Ichalkaranji. “It is bound to take a toll on anyone’s body, no matter how healthy one is.”

Ganpatye is intimately aware of the profound cost that such conditions extract. In June 2018, her husband Vijay Ganpatye—who worked at a power loom unit, often tending to as many as ten shuttles at a time—suddenly collapsed. “He had a heart attack,” Swati told me.

The employers did not take him to hospital immediately. Instead, Swati said, they made him sniff an onion and a chappal so that he could regain consciousness. “We lost critical time,” she recalled. When Vijay was finally taken to hospital, the doctors pronounced him dead. Swati still remembers the inconsolable sobs of their young children as they peeped through a grill frame to look at their father’s body.

Vijay worked at the factory he died in for nearly two decades. He was the sole earning member in his family. At the time of his demise, the owner reassured Swati that the education of her kids would be taken care of. When she tried to follow up, he stonewalled her. “One day, he asked me why he should pay for my kids’ education when Vijay was the one who had a heart attack,” she recalled. 

Swati went to the court in response. As the case dragged on for a year and a half, the employer relented. Eventually, she settled with him for Rs 1.75 lakh. When I contacted the owner of the factory at which Vijay worked, he refused to respond.

Most workers and their families are compelled to settle out of court—about 95 percent, estimated Kamble, who has represented several workers in the labour court—for an amount that is far less than the compensation they are legally entitled to receive. On paper, the workers are protected under labour laws such as the Employees Compensation Act, 1923. But these protections offer scant respite since much of the labour is informal.

“Most employers do not maintain proper salary slips and attendance records, which makes it difficult for workers to prove they worked for them,” Kamble told me. “In many instances, if the employer admits a worker to hospital after an accident, it is treated as legal proof of their employment. But even then, the cases drag on for years and workers can’t afford to fight it out.”

In late 2015, Bajrang Arge—a 65-year-old loom worker from Chandur, a village near Ichalkaranji—learnt this the hard way.

Between 20 August and 5 September that year, sizing workers in Ichalkaranji called for a strike to demand better compensation and working facilities. Arge wasn’t among the workers who called for the strike, but half his salary was docked in the week that followed. He approached the labour court. Enraged, his employer sacked him on 15 September.

Arge wasn’t willing to go down without a fight. His fight for a full salary morphed into a battle over the unlawful termination of his employment. He alleged that his employer owed him one lakh rupees for all the hours he had worked overtime since he had been hired in January 2012. Arge’s accusations were not limited to monetary claims. “Twice, when I arrived late for work, my owner slapped me,” he told me. Arge’s employer did not respond when I contacted him.

Over the next three and a half years, Arge pursued the matter diligently, commuting to the hearings on his bicycle. The court ruled against him. “My employer had not kept any record or registers that proved I worked for him,” he recalled. “Even the payment used to happen in cash. He simply said I never worked for him and I lost the case.”

THE SITUATION WAS not always this bleak.

“There was a time when owners and their labourers both lived in rented one-room apartments in Ichalkaranji,” Datta Mane said, “Today, those who run the factories have moved into flats and bungalows while the workers are still living in slums.” Satish Koshti, the president of the Ichalkaranji Powerloom Weavers Co-operative Association, agreed with this grim assessment. “Earlier,” he said, “workers could rise up the ranks and start their own factory, but those days are gone.”

In the early nineties, this was the transition that Nirmala and Bajrang had hoped to make when they opened a textile factory with their savings. “But the investment didn’t quite work out,” Niranjan recalled.  

Bajrang and his brother fell out, which meant that he had to take on more familial responsibilities. This coincided with a couple of bad business decisions. As a result, Nirmala and Bajrang were forced to shut their factory and go back to their earlier lives. “My father speaks about it even today,” Niranjan told me. “He regrets the fact that he couldn’t work it out. If he had, we would have been factory owners today with a much better financial status.”

But even factory owners claim that they are not as well-off as they once were. According to Koshti, the number of power looms in the region have come down from 1.25 lakh to just under a lakh because the business has become unsustainable. “Traditional units don’t require much capital,” he said. “The bigger factories with advanced technologies require lakhs or even crores of rupees to set up. Only the very few people who own those are doing well.” 

Omkar Deshpande, a labour lawyer based in Pune, saw merit in this argument. “While it is true that workers don’t get the compensation and wages they are entitled to, several power loom owners in Ichalkaranji are genuinely struggling,” he told me. “If the power looms close down, thousands of people would be totally out of work at a time when unemployment is high. It is a tricky situation.”

Koshti pointed to some of the issues he believed needed government intervention. “The state’s import-export policy has been detrimental to our business. We should make sure the textile mills have enough cotton before exporting it,” he said. “Since the prices of cotton were not stabilised,” he added, “production costs were subject to frequent changes while the prices that owners were able to command for their wares remained stagnant.”

The power loom owners in Ichalkaranji procure yarn—which mostly comes from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu—as raw material. The cost of the yarn ranges between hundred rupees and 1,200 rupees per kilogram, depending on the quality.  According to Koshti, one kg can produce about eight to ten metres of cloth, which tends to be priced between 15 rupees and 200 rupees per metre. Consequently, on an average, factory owners produce cloth worth sixty crore rupees on a daily basis.

Since Ichalkaranji has limited capacity for further processing, such as dyeing and printing, the value of the cloth escalates substantially once it is treated in regions such as Surat, Kanpur or Mumbai. “After that, the value of the material goes from sixty crore rupees to 240 crore rupees or even 300 crore rupees,” Koshti told me, “Most of the money in cotton is made by people higher up in the chain. We barely break even.”

These difficulties, he said, had been amplified by the impacts of demonetisation, the Goods and Services Tax, and the nationwide lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I don’t think we have recovered to our full potential even today,” he told me. “We have stopped following up with the State and Centre because our demands keep falling on deaf ears.” In the winter of 2021, soon after the second wave of the global pandemic in India, three factory owners from Ichalkaranji, burdened by financial crisis, reportedly died by suicide. 

The state government appears to be paying some attention now. In December 2023, the Textiles Minister of Maharashtra, Chandrakant Patil, appointed a committee to examine the concerns of the power loom industry in the state. According to a story in The Times of India, the committee submitted its report in February 2024. It recommended a subsidy on power tariffs, multi-party electricity connections in a common shed, and the digitisation of registration for loom owners so that they could better avail of existing schemes. In January, just a month before this submission, the state government announced a subsidy of 52 crore rupees for about 400 textile-processing units in the Ichalkaranji power loom mega cluster.

It is not clear whether these measures will be enough to put the beleaguered industry back on track. “Once Ichalkaranji was famed for its produce, but you now hear stories of someone or the other shutting down their unit every week,” the journalist Asif Kurane told the news website Newsclick. “If the situation persists, thousands of labourers will be without work. We will only get to read in books that this city was once called Maharashtra’s Manchester.

FOR SWATI, THE settlement she accepted after Vijay’s death was a way to ensure that her children did not undergo the same fate as her husband. “I want to educate them and make sure they never set foot in a power loom,” she said. In this sense, she plans to do what Shobha Shinde achieved.

Shobha married her husband Namdev when she was twelve years old. Their son Anoj was born a year later. Like his family members, Namdev worked as a labourer in a power loom unit. When Anoj was a young child, about eight or nine years old, Shobha and Namdev decided that they wouldn’t have any more children. “We knew we couldn’t afford higher education for more than one kid. The idea was to ensure that ours was the last generation that worked in textile units.”

As Anoj grew older, Shobha realised that for her son to have the means to escape the drudgery of the factory, she would have to immerse herself in it. “When Anoj finished his tenth-standard exams, I decided to learn how this works,” she said. Propelled by the promise of their son’s future, both she and Namdev worked as many hours as they could, taking very few holidays. They set aside all their savings for Anoj’s education.

After Anoj graduated from college, he pursued a Master of Business Administration. It cost Rs 7.5 lakh, about four years of his parents’ earnings. Shobha and Namdev could only afford a part of the fees. They borrowed the rest from a bank. The weight of these sacrifices was not lost on their son.

Anoj has now moved to Pune, where he runs two driving schools with fourteen vehicles. “He even repaid the education loan,” Shobha told me proudly. “He has a family there and he is well settled. That’s all I have ever wanted.”

Shobha and Namdev continue to work in factories, even though Anoj insists they stop. “We still have our bodies and minds intact,” Shobha said. “It doesn’t feel right to just stop working.” But she understands Anoj’s concerns. “Workers keep getting injured around us all the time,” she said. “Most owners aren’t generous with treatment or compensation even if it’s an on-site accident.”

The realisation of this fact altered the course of Niranjan Phatak’s life.

Niranjan started working at a textile unit as a teenager when his parents needed financial support. For years, Nirmala coaxed him to do something else. Now he is hoping to crack the entrance exams that will help him join the police force. He isn’t able to take time off work to prepare and keeps missing by a narrow margin. But in the meantime, he is employed at the courier company Blue Dart. Ever since his mother’s death, Niranjan cannot bear to step inside a textile factory. “It reminds me of my mother,” he told me. “The sounds of the shuttle remind me of what killed her.”