Saranya Ganti

High School Finalist, Grade 10
Ellicott City, MD

Equal wages for artisans

The Kanjivaram silk sari my mom wears to every wedding took a weaver about a month to make the last time we visited India in 2023. Thread by thread, on a loom his family has used for generations. When my mom told me it retailed for around ₹30,000 (about $360), I assumed the weaver had been paid fairly for that month of skill and labor. He was not. Studies show weavers typically take home no more than ₹7,000,  or about $84, for a sari that sells for that price. That is roughly only a quarter of its sale value. The rest goes into the hands of middlemen and retailers who never even touch a loom. That gap is the developmental issue I care most about: the underpayment of India's handicraft and handloom artisans,  whose work fills American homes and closets while the people who make it struggle to survive. 

This is not a small problem. India's handicraft and handloom sector employs an estimated 1.13 crore people, which is over 11 million workers. However, the average worker earns roughly ₹270 a day, which is below the legal minimum wage in every state studied. Handloom weavers specifically often earn just ₹200 to ₹250 a day, and depending on the year surveyed, two-thirds to nearly all weavers make less than ₹5,000 a month. The consequences are evident: the number of handloom weavers in India fell from about 43.3 lakh in 1995 to roughly 26 lakh by 2020, a decline of nearly 40%, as young people watch their parents work brutal hours for wages that cannot support a family and choose any other path they can find.  This crisis also affects women populations. In parts of India, the majority of handloom businesses are women-owned: over 94% in Rajasthan, nearly 80% in Uttar Pradesh, and approximately 70% in Assam.  When the handloom industry collapses, women's economic independence and household security collapse with it as well. 

Middlemen supply artisans with raw materials and then buy back the finished goods at what the industry itself calls "nominal labour charges," reselling to exporters and retailers at high markups, and since raw and unfinished materials are often taxed at a higher rate than certain finished handloom goods, the weaver's margin gets eroded from both directions before a single sari or rug reaches a shop shelf. 

This is where the issue stops being distant — in fiscal year 2024, India exported handloom products worth ₹1,146 crore, and the United States was the top buyer, which means the beautiful, hand-finished textiles sold in American boutiques, gift shops, and online marketplaces are very often the same products built on  

wages that keep their makers in poverty. American consumers are not bystanders to this system; we are inside its supply chain every time we buy a "handmade in India" label without asking who was paid, and how little. 

The good news is that individuals in the US have real leverage here because so much of this trade runs directly through our wallets. The clearest solution is supporting direct-to-consumer artisan cooperatives like Rangsutra and Karghewale, which cut out predatory middlemen entirely by connecting weavers straight to buyers. Hence, a much larger share of the sale price reaches the person who made the product. At the same time, fair-trade fashion brands like People Tree work directly with Indian artisan cooperatives under audited labor standards. Shoppers can seek out Fair Trade Federation–certified retailers the way they might already look for organic or cruelty-free labels, and on a policy and awareness level,  organizations like the Crafts Council of India and the Institute for Human Development are doing the research that makes this problem visible in the first place, so donating to or amplifying their work helps keep pressure on the industry to change.

On an individual level, the shift can be as simple as changing one question we ask before we buy, so instead of only asking "is this beautiful" or "is this a good price," we can ask "who made this, and were they paid fairly for it?" and that single question, multiplied across the millions of American consumers who buy Indian textiles and handicrafts every year and acted on by choosing fair-trade and cooperative sellers over unverified middlemen supply chains, could redirect real money back toward the 11 million artisans whose skill built this industry in the first place. 

My aunt's sari still hangs in her closet and I still think it's beautiful, but beauty made by hands that are paid a quarter of what their work is worth is not a finished story — it's an open question about who gets to benefit from India's artistry, and whether people like me, three continents away, are willing to close that gap instead of simply admiring it.