Beyond Made In India: Why Designed In India Will Define The Future Of Indian Textiles

Writing at the close of Bharat Tex 2026, Union Textiles Minister Shri Giriraj Singh set out an ambition that deserves to be read twice. India, he wrote, must move beyond “Made in India” to “Imagined, Designed and Branded in India.” It is a simple statement with far-reaching implications because it identifies the final frontier of India’s textile competitiveness. It is also where the greatest value remains to be created.

India’s manufacturing story is no longer in question. The country’s textile and apparel industry has grown to nearly USD 190 billion and is targeting USD 350 billion by 2030. It directly employs over five crore people, exports to more than 190 countries, and is backed by an ambitious infrastructure push through seven PM MITRA mega parks, the PLI scheme, and eighteen free trade agreements covering fifty-six countries. Bharat Tex itself has emerged as one of the world’s largest textile gatherings, attracting buyers from over 130 countries. As the Minister rightly observed, the world trusts India.

Yet trust alone is not enough. As the Minister also noted, trust must now be converted into scale, and scale can no longer mean production alone. Here lies the quiet paradox of Indian textiles. A nation that clothes the world still relies overwhelmingly on design tools built elsewhere. The patterns, markers, weave structures and 3D samples that determine what an Indian factory ultimately produces are, in most digitised units, created using imported software, licensed in foreign currency, supported across foreign time zones and priced for foreign markets. Meanwhile, in the far larger number of units that are yet to digitise, design continues to depend on chalk, cardboard patterns and individual experience. Both realities come at a cost. One exports margins. The other forfeits them altogether.

Design is not decoration. It is economics.

Design is often mistaken for the glamorous side of the textile business, while manufacturing is seen as the real engine of value. The economics tells a very different story.

In apparel manufacturing, fabric typically accounts for sixty to seventy per cent of garment cost. The single biggest determinant of fabric consumption is the marker, the digital layout that decides how pattern pieces are arranged on fabric. Even a one per cent improvement in marker efficiency flows almost directly to the bottom line. Across a mid-sized export house processing lakhs of metres of fabric every month, that seemingly small gain can determine whether an order is won or lost. Today’s AI-driven nesting engines consistently achieve marker efficiencies beyond the reach of manual methods or legacy software. This is design technology improving not the appearance of a garment, but the commercial viability of the factory producing it.

“Every buyer I work with now assumes digital sampling and tight consumption as the baseline, not the differentiator. An export house that can turn a style around in days, on markers a full point tighter, simply wins orders that others lose. Indigenous tools that put that capability within reach of every Indian factory change the arithmetic of the whole trade,” said Amit Prasad, Founder and CEO, PETEXX Buying House.

The same principle extends across the entire value chain that the Minister describes, from farm to fibre to factory to fashion to foreign. Digital pattern-making and grading compress sampling cycles from weeks to days, meeting the speed global buyers increasingly demand. Three-dimensional visualisation enables exporters to secure buyer approvals in Europe before a single metre of fabric is cut. Production planning software converts trust into reliable, on-time delivery. None of these capabilities are peripheral to competitiveness. Increasingly, they define competitiveness.

The heritage dividend

The Minister’s article makes a second point that deserves equal attention. India’s “extraordinary repository of motifs, temple art, crafts and weaves must inspire globally desired Indian brands.” This is not simply a cultural aspiration. It represents India’s single most defensible competitive advantage. No competing exporter can replicate Banarasi brocade, Kanjeevaram, Pochampally ikat, Chanderi or Paithani because these are not merely products. They are civilisational archives.

An archive, however, creates value only when modern markets can access it. A jacquard weave that exists only in the memory of a master weaver cannot be scaled, licensed, adapted for a global collection or protected as intellectual property. Once digitised into CAD weave libraries, that same design heritage becomes searchable, teachable and reusable by a new generation of designers. It can be deployed on modern looms without losing its identity. Weave and jacquard CAD platforms, including those developed indigenously by REACH Technologies of Bangalore, now enable handloom clusters and heritage institutions to build these libraries themselves while retaining both the craft and its commercial value within India. This is precisely how craft becomes brand, the transition the Minister has called for.

Sustainability is now a design decision

The Minister is unequivocal in stating that sustainability and circularity “are no longer optional; they are the foundations of competitiveness.” What is less widely understood is where sustainability is actually determined. By the time a garment reaches the factory floor, much of its environmental footprint has already been locked in through design decisions involving fabric choice, material consumption and garment construction.

The most powerful green technology in apparel is therefore not found at the effluent treatment plant but at the design workstation. Smarter markers reduce fabric waste. Three-dimensional sampling eliminates multiple physical samples and international courier shipments. Better cut plans minimize leftover fabric.

Beyond the factory gate, global buyers, driven increasingly by European regulation, are moving rapidly towards digital product passports and verifiable traceability. Indian exporters who can demonstrate chain-of-custody data and recycled-content verification will retain business. Those who cannot risk losing orders to better-prepared competitors. Traceability and quality management platforms designed specifically for Indian manufacturing conditions, affordable for MSMEs, capable of functioning in low-connectivity environments and hosted on Indian cloud infrastructure, are what transform the Minister’s vision of trust as an economic asset into something global buyers can verify.

Software as swadeshi infrastructure

India has already demonstrated through digital identity and payments that indigenous digital infrastructure can transform the economics of an entire sector. UPI did not simply compete with foreign card networks. It fundamentally redefined the cost and accessibility of digital payments.

Textile design software stands at a similar turning point. When the tools for design, marker planning, quality management and traceability are developed in India, priced in rupees, supported in Indian languages and time zones, and engineered for the realities of Indian MSMEs rather than European fashion houses, digitisation ceases to be a privilege reserved for the largest exporters. It becomes accessible across the vast manufacturing capacity spread throughout India’s textile clusters.

This is where more than two decades of Indian software engineering become strategically important. REACH Technologies has spent over twenty years building precisely this digital layer from Bangalore. Its portfolio includes apparel CAD with AI-enabled automated marker planning, cut planning, 3D garment visualisation, jacquard and dobby weave design, embroidery and print design, quality management and digital traceability. Today these solutions serve customers across five continents and are deployed across Indian institutions under six Union Ministries, from NSTIWs to NIT Jalandhar and DKTE Ichalkaranji. The fact that an Indian company competes successfully in a field long dominated by European and American vendors reinforces the Minister’s central message. India can imagine and design the tools, not merely use them.

The skilling multiplier

The Minister rightly identifies skilling as one of the sector’s greatest opportunities. This is where design technology delivers perhaps its most lasting impact.

A PM MITRA park can be built in three years. The skilled workforce required to power it cannot, unless training begins today using the same technologies employed by industry. Programmes such as SAMARTH have already created the delivery framework. What completes that ecosystem is industry-grade CAD education in classrooms, enabling trainees in Kalaburagi, Virudhunagar or Warangal to graduate already proficient in the digital workflows of modern export houses.

“In design education, the tool on the classroom desk decides the graduate’s first day at work. When institutions train on industry-grade Indian software, we close the gap between the campus and the export house, and we build the design workforce the PM MITRA parks will need, in time for them to need it,” said Dr. NVR Nathan, Former Director, NIFT Hyderabad.

When indigenous software powers that training, the benefits multiply. Lower licensing costs allow wider deployment. Wider deployment produces a larger pool of skilled professionals. A larger talent pool lowers the adoption barrier for MSMEs employing those graduates. Design capability spreads in much the same way as literacy. It grows through institutions.

Both, together

“Made in India” built the factories, the industrial parks and the export relationships. “Designed in India” is what transforms that foundation into stronger brands, healthier margins and greater pricing power. Ultimately, it is the difference between selling manufacturing capacity and selling creativity.

The two should not be viewed as separate stages. They are parts of the same system. Design technology makes manufacturing more efficient, while manufacturing scale makes design capability commercially valuable.

The Minister concluded his article with an invitation to experience Bharat Tex not merely as a showcase of the future of textiles, but as an opportunity to participate in building it. India’s software builders accepted that invitation years ago. The tools already exist. They have been built in India, proven across five continents and priced for Indian industry. What remains is adoption at national scale across every textile cluster, every training institute and every export house that intends to contribute to a USD 350 billion industry by 2030.

Made in India. Designed in India. As the Minister rightly wrote, the future of global textiles is being woven today. For the first time, both the loom and the design upon it can be Indian.

The above information is the author's own; Outlook India is not involved in the creation of this article.