Over production imposes severe cost on the environment.

Μore the merrier, the adage, at times could be deceptive. The apparel industry’s pet sales strategy—“buy one—get one free” causes more harm than good. Earlier, this strategy was confined to a few festival months. It’s almost round the year now in India’s affluent markets.

The shoppers, naturally, are tempted to buy more than they need. The experience of feeling high is not just a one-time affair. It rekindles in their mind again when they see the trendy clothes with tantalizing deal of “get two for price of one”. But the hidden cost of this culture on environment and human lives is enormous.

The overproduction and over consumption of apparel gorges natural resources. It affects environment adversely. The most visible aspect of this increasing trend is declining ground water and scarcity of safe drinking water.

The next is the health of workers engaged in the entire chain of production. Despite large scale mechanization of production, human interface play a significant role in majority of supply-chains. With sub-contracting being the norm, the workers, naturally, are made to work more—to overproduce. It drains them.

Besides long hours, a job that needs say, three persons, is actually carried by one. Although the earning is higher, the stress caused by overwork slowly affects the health. The medical bill consequently rises—sometimes more than the income. Worse, there are examples of higher socio-economic status achieved through hard work is reduced to penury after a major illness caused by stress. A short cycle of gain followed by a long cycle of loss has other social implications.

The attitude of the consumers is equally deplorable. The majority of those who buy don’t utilize the attire to the hilt. The wastage on the resources is considerable if one takes into account the amount of packaging material deployed to wrap the beautiful apparels.

A report by Global Fashion Agenda and Sustainable Apparel Coalition in partnership with Boston Consulting Group uses a scoring system called the Pulse Index to assess fashion companies’ sustainability goals and implementation efforts. It showed that while the fashion industry enhanced its overall score to six points in 2017, in 2018 that score decreased to only four points. The other pointers are not healthy. About 11 per cent of India’s export business is from the garment industry. The effect on the environment, therefore, is significant.

The declining in eco-friendly measures is worrying. Anita Dongre, an Indian fashion designer who with its brand runs Grassroots—a division dedicated to ethical fashion commented sometime ago, “Somewhere we underplay ourselves, and as a country we’re very sustainable, but we try to ape the West and have become more materialistic. Thirty years ago, we lived so mindfully—for instance we always had steel tiffin’s and never plastic. We always conserved; we were very mindful about wasting food. We have rich culture that we can imbibe from, there’s so much we can still learn from the villages of India.”

Low price of apparel naturally come with poor quality and short durability. The reason is simple. How much processes can be streamlined and refined that price of a product diminishes over a period of time when the cost of other variables in the production loop is increasing. The culprit that plays in this game is easy access to finance made available to chosen few. It subsequently builds these unsustainable bubbles, which catalyses a culture of use and throw. Disposable of the used clothes is another challenge, as not all the ingredients in a garment are biodegradable.

The paradox is that over production is practiced in an age when advanced IT tools, AI and Analytics can measure the exact demand of a product from the shopping behavior of customers. Why then the old mind-set of overproduction is deployed to make a venture profitable?

Time has come to review and rethink—what appear cheap is actually costly. The way ahead is to adopt sustainable practices reduce consumption and thereby, reduce individual carbon foot prints.