Capacity Building and R&D: Building India’s Fashion Industry Future

India’s fashion and textile industry did not turn into a global export powerhouse by accident. Behind the runway shows and retail chains sits a quieter, less glamorous engine: institutions that train skilled professionals and laboratories that solve technical problems. Capacity building and R&D form the backbone that lets India’s apparel sector compete on quality, speed, and innovation. Understanding how these institutions work explains a lot about why “Made in India” fashion now reaches shelves worldwide.

Building human capital for India’s fashion industry 🔗

A design idea is only as good as the people who can execute it. India’s apparel export industry needed trained manpower long before it had the institutions to supply it, which is exactly the gap the government stepped in to fill.

NIFT: shaping design and management talent 🔗

The National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) was set up under the Ministry of Textiles, Government of India, to build a professional talent pipeline for the country’s design, technology, and management needs. It began with curriculum support from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and it has since grown into a network of campuses spread across the country, offering undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral programmes in design, fashion technology, and management.

A turning point came in 2006, when an Act of Parliament gave NIFT statutory status, allowing it to award its own degrees rather than depend on affiliation with another university. This mattered because it let NIFT set its own academic standards and respond faster to what the industry actually needed, instead of waiting on a slower, external approval process.

NIFT’s role goes beyond classroom teaching. Faculty are expected to stay current with real industry practices, which is why the institute regularly collaborates with exporters, retailers, and design houses on live projects. It has also taken on applied work such as developing an India-specific body-size chart for the apparel industry, which directly affects how well ready-to-wear clothing fits Indian consumers.

SVPISTM: specialised textile and retail management education 🔗

Not every skill gap in the industry is about design. Someone still has to manage sourcing, production planning, quality control, and retail operations, and that requires a different kind of training. The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International School of Textiles & Management (SVPISTM), set up in 2002 in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, under the Ministry of Textiles, was created to fill exactly this niche.

SVPISTM focuses specifically on textile, apparel, and retail management education, offering programmes at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, including a widely recognised MBA. Coimbatore itself is a natural home for the institute since the city has long been a hub for South India’s textile manufacturing, giving students close proximity to mills, spinning units, and export houses where they can see the industry in action rather than only in a textbook.

Coordinating industry growth through advisory bodies 🔗

Training people is one half of the equation. The other half is making sure the industry’s different players – farmers, mills, exporters, and government – are actually talking to each other. That coordination role falls to a set of advisory and promotional bodies.

The Cotton Advisory Board: linking farm to factory 🔗

Cotton remains the backbone fibre of Indian textiles, and its supply chain runs from farmers to ginners to spinning mills to garment exporters. The Cotton Advisory Board (CAB) exists to keep this chain coordinated, functioning as a liaison between the cotton-growing and cotton-textile-milling sides of the industry under the Office of the Textile Commissioner. By bringing growers, industry representatives, and policymakers to the same table, the CAB helps smooth out the kind of supply and pricing mismatches that can otherwise disrupt production planning for mills and exporters alike.

Export promotion councils: opening global markets 🔗

Once goods are made, someone has to help get them into international markets, handle trade documentation, and represent Indian exporters’ interests abroad. This is the job of the Export Promotion Councils (EPCs), autonomous bodies set up under the aegis of the Ministry of Textiles for specific segments of the textile and apparel value chain.

The Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) represents garment exporters and works on market access, trade fairs, and skilling initiatives for the clothing sector. The Cotton Textiles Export Promotion Council (TEXPROCIL) performs a similar role for cotton textile exporters. The Synthetic & Rayon Textiles Export Promotion Council, one of the oldest such bodies, has actually been renamed the Man-made and Technical Textiles Export Promotion Council (MATEXIL) to reflect its expanded focus on man-made fibres and technical textiles, a segment the government is actively trying to grow. And the Indian Silk Export Promotion Council (ISEPC) supports India’s position as a major producer of silk in the global market.

Each council provides market intelligence, organises international trade delegations, and lobbies for policies that keep Indian exporters competitive against manufacturing hubs like Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Textile research associations: the engine of applied R&D 🔗

Design skill and market access only go so far without technical innovation happening behind the scenes: better fibres, cleaner dyeing processes, stronger fabrics, and more efficient machinery. This applied research is carried out by a network of Textile Research Associations (TRAs), industry-sponsored bodies that receive financial support from the Ministry of Textiles. Each TRA typically serves a particular region or fibre segment:

Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association (ATIRA), one of the oldest, was established in the late 1940s and remains a major centre for process optimisation and new product development in Gujarat’s textile belt. Bombay Textile Research Association (BTRA), based in Mumbai, grew out of the city’s cotton milling industry. South India Textile Research Association (SITRA), headquartered in Coimbatore, is considered one of the best-equipped textile research institutes in the world and serves members across South and Southeast Asia. Northern India Textile Research Association (NITRA), near Delhi, was set up jointly by industry and the Ministry of Textiles to serve the powerloom-heavy northern belt.

Beyond cotton, Man-Made Textile Research Association (MANTRA) in Surat and Synthetic and Art Silk Mills Research Association (SASMIRA) in Mumbai focus on synthetic and blended fibres, while the Wool Research Association (WRA) in Thane serves the woollen textile sector. A further body, the Indian Jute Industries’ Research Association (IJIRA), supports jute and allied fibres and is one of the oldest of the group, tracing its origins back to the 1930s.

Together, these TRAs act as the applied-science arm of the industry: testing raw materials, developing new machinery attachments, running quality certification, and training technicians, so that mills don’t have to build in-house research capacity on their own.

Government funding: powering innovation and technology upgradation 🔗

Research institutions need money to operate, and this is where direct government funding comes in. Existing literature on the industry consistently points to technology upgradation, supportive policy, design innovation, and quality assurance as the critical levers for sustained growth, and the Ministry of Textiles has built specific schemes around each of these.

The National Technical Textiles Mission (NTTM) is the most visible of these efforts, channelling funding into research projects run by IITs, NITs, and other institutions on subjects like geotextiles, smart textiles, and composites. As of late 2024, the Mission’s total approved funding had crossed ₹500 crore across more than 160 projects. A related scheme, the Grant for Research and Entrepreneurship across Aspiring Innovators in Technical Textiles (GREAT), offers grant-in-aid of up to ₹50 lakh to startups working on prototypes in technical textiles, routed through incubators housed at IITs, NITs, NIFT campuses, and the TRAs discussed above.

The government has also funded laboratory upgrades and new academic courses at dozens of institutions, engaging universities, engineering colleges, and bodies recognised by the AICTE and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). This mix of grants, lab infrastructure support, and course development funding is designed to close the loop: train more specialists, give them access to modern equipment, and fund the research that keeps Indian textiles technically competitive with global players.

What do you think? Which do you think matters more for the long-term competitiveness of Indian fashion exports: producing more trained graduates through institutes like NIFT and SVPISTM, or funding deeper technical R&D through bodies like the TRAs? And do you see the newer focus on technical textiles changing what “fashion education” needs to cover in the next decade?

References

1. https://nift.ac.in/theinstitute
2. https://www.svpistm.ac.in/
3. https://texmin.nic.in/attached-subordinate-offices
4. https://texmin.nic.in/about-us/export-promotion-councils
5. https://www.ibef.org/exports/synthetic-and-rayon-textiles
6. https://texmin.nic.in/about-us/textile-research-associations
7. https://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/geo-textiles-news/india-approves-12-research-projects-under-technical-textiles-mission-299043-newsdetails.htm
8. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1953180