India: Export water and faces drought

Almost 50 percent of India’s 1.3 billion population is facing water stress, and about 2,00,000 die annually because they do not have access to safe water.

India has few sectors which consume most of the water and merely leave anything behind, the textile is one of those sectors.

Textile Industry

A cotton t-shirt requires 2700 litres of water to make which covers the water used from cotton plantation until the t-shirt is placed in the store’s shelves. Dyeing of textiles alone consumes 2.4 trillion gallons of water every year. On a median, India uses 22,500 litres of water to produce 1 kg of cotton. Most Indian cotton is grown in drier regions. Within the year 2019, 61 lakh tonnes of raw cotton were produced.

India is one of the world’s largest exporters of Virtual Water. We do not explicitly export water; we pair up by selling other commodities that use water. Crops, textiles, and machinery all need water and every time we ship these items abroad, we send many lakh litres of water along with it. We export 95,400 million litres of water every year.

Indian textile market valued $100 billion in FY19 (and it is expected to reach $223 billion by 2025). One-third of what textile industry produce is being exported. This industry is the second largest employer after agriculture, employing 6 crore people. Textile is additionally among the essential needs, so we cannot simply stop it.

The World Bank estimates that 17-20 percentage of economic pollution comes from textile treatments. To keep with the research of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 47 percent of the world’s population will face severe water shortage by 2030.

Strategies to spice up water footprint

Shifting to the use of organic cotton than of conventional cotton.
Decrease the utilization of polyester to chop back pollution furthermore.
Be mindful while washing your clothes- wash a full load of clothes within the machine, and only wash when needed.
Water reuse systems recycle the treated water.
Specific low water use technology like low liquor ratio dyeing.
Use of eco dye, which reduces energy and water consumption by 20 and 25 percent respectively.
Addition of dye pigment at the primary stage than at the traditional later stage of the textile process.
Application of water-free finishing- use of pumice stones through ozone finishing.