Indian Garment Clusters and CSR Norms: Incompatible Agendas at the Bottom of the Garment Commodity Chain

Abstract

Today, India is an important player in garment export. Production is highly “localised” and scattered across the subcontinent. It is organised in industrial clusters, with distinct production and labour practices and product specialisations. Product cycles involve numerous ancillary activities, and are often decentralised from main urban tailoring hubs. They connect different realms and spaces of production and labour, and different clusters. This paper explores how this organisational layout severely limits the impact of old and new corporate social responsibility (CSR) labour projects and regulations. It does so by looking at the case of the National Capital Region and one of its satellite embroidery centres, Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh. In particular, it reveals the contradictory nature of new CSR projects focusing on homeworkers. The arguments developed here are not only a criticism of global buyers' approaches to labour standards. They also more broadly question the ability to elaborate meaningful standards within decentralised production regimes, deconstructing over-optimistic images of India as a “rising power”.