India’s textile and apparel industry is quietly changing the rules in its playbook. Once celebrated mainly for low labour costs and vast cotton fields, the sector is now investing in robotics, virtual design tools, sensor-rich supply chains and green mega-parks—transformations that are shrinking lead times for global brands while expanding the country’s economic ambitions. As per a Press Release by PIB, projections peg the domestic market at US $350 billion by 2030, up from about US $174 billion today—a leap officials say will be powered as much by digitalisation as by scale itself.
A major driver of this shift lies upstream, where garment sketches are turning into “digital twins” instead of physical samples. Indian factories that once waited weeks for couriered prototypes now share three-dimensional files with buyers in hours. Working executives describe product-development cycles that have fallen from months to days, a cadence impossible without broadband design studios and cloud-based PLM (product life-cycle management) platforms.
Inside the plants, the hardware is changing just as quickly. According to the International Federation of Robotics, India installed 8,510 industrial robots in 2023—an all-time record and a 59 percent jump over the previous year, ranking the country seventh worldwide. Many of those units still weld car frames, but a growing share hem T-shirts, calibrate digital looms and operate laser-guided cutters that allow factories to accept smaller, higher-margin orders from fashion houses wary of excess inventory.
Policy tailwinds are accelerating adoption. The Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for textiles has cleared projects worth roughly ₹28,000 crore, with the Ministry of Textiles forecasting additional turnover of ₹2,00,000 crore and the creation of about 250,000 new jobs as factories modernise to produce man-made-fibre garments, technical textiles and smart fabrics. Complementing PLI are seven PM-MITRA parks—fully serviced, “plug-and-play” industrial cities that promise common effluent-treatment plants, digital logistics hubs and advanced testing laboratories. Each park aims to attract ₹10,000 crore in private investment while generating 100,000 direct and 200,000 indirect jobs, baking technology and sustainability into the infrastructure itself.
The domestic e-commerce boom gives manufacturers a real-time feedback loop. Bain & Company estimates India’s online retail gross-merchandise value at US $57–60 billion in 2023 and projects it to more than double to about US $160 billion by 2028. As consumer demand becomes more granular and seasonless, brands are leaning on on-demand production models that thrive on digitally connected factories. In June 2025, Reuters reported that fast-fashion giant Shein and Reliance Retail plan to scale their network of Indian garment suppliers from 150 to 1,000 within a year and begin exporting India-made collections to the United States and the United Kingdom within six to twelve months—an expansion feasible only because factories can transmit capacity data and design revisions instantaneously.
People remain central to the transformation, and the skills pipeline is being deliberately widened. Thousands of workers have been trained across various verticles in everything from digital pattern-making to automated loom maintenance. Such initiatives are gradually converting traditional machine operators into “operator-programmers” capable of running sensor-laden equipment and interpreting production dashboards.
Perhaps the clearest sign of maturity is the country’s openness to micro-factories—compact, highly automated units designed for limited-edition streetwear or customised sports jerseys. These nodes, scattered across second-tier cities, feed into larger export hubs for basics. The resulting mesh network balances speed, flexibility and scale: small runs launch in days, while volume orders move through proven high-capacity lines, all coordinated through a single cloud interface.
Early results are visible in trade data. The Annual Report 2023-24 by the Ministry of Textiles states, textiles and apparel—including handicrafts—accounted for 8.21 percent of India’s merchandise exports in fiscal 2023-24 as outbound shipments recovered despite a patchy global economy. Analysts see that share rising as brands diversify sourcing away from single-country dependence and as India’s integrated, tech-first clusters offer both transparency and scale.
India’s fashion supply chain is morphing into a digitally networked, policy-enabled ecosystem where 3-D renderings flow seamlessly into robot-run lines, QR-coded bales trace cotton back to the farm, and green mega-parks speed finished garments to ports. For brands making their way through unpredictable markets and trying to win over sustainability mandates, the key advice is clear, partner with an ecosystem that offers both cultural depth and digital dexterity. In stitching those two strengths together, India is not merely catching up with the future of fashion manufacturing—it is helping to tailor it.
