Tiruppur Sent About Rs 46,000 Crore of Knitwear Abroad in 2025-26, and Its Dyeing Plants Reuse Their Wastewater Under a Court-Ordered Zero Liquid Discharge Rule

The Tiruppur Exporters’ Association (TEA) says the Tamil Nadu town exported more than Rs 46,000 crore of knitwear in 2025-26, about 3 per cent above the Rs 44,747 crore of 2024-25. A crore is ten million, so the figure is Rs 460 billion, which Apparel Resources converted to US$4.87 billion. The association’s president, K.M. Subramanian, gave the number at a meeting with the Union Textiles Minister that Apparel Resources reported on 29 June 2026, and put Tiruppur’s share at nearly 60 per cent of India’s knitwear exports.

The same town’s dyeing plants work under a zero liquid discharge rule, which means treated wastewater is reused and none is released into the Noyyal river. The association says the town’s 360 dyeing units treat 130 million litres a day and recycle 96 per cent of it. The rule came out of a farmers’ petition filed in 2003 and a court-ordered closure in 2011. Every figure below carries its source and date, and where sources disagree both numbers are given.

What the export figures say, and where they differ

Two reports on 2025-26 use the same 2024-25 base of Rs 44,747 crore and reach opposite directions. The 29 June report carries the association’s Rs 46,000 crore. An Apparel Resources report of 6 June 2026, citing “industry data” it does not name, gives Rs 42,544.40 crore for 2025-26, down 4.91 per cent, and blames US tariffs and disruption from the West Asia crisis. Neither report says exactly what it counts, so tuput gives both.

The share of national exports is also stated in more than one way. Subramanian’s figure in June 2026 was nearly 60 per cent of India’s knitwear exports. Upstox, in a feature updated on 29 September 2026, quotes the association as saying Tiruppur supplies about 55 per cent of India’s knitwear exports and 90 per cent of its cotton knitwear exports. A 2014 academic chapter by Muniandi Jegadeesan and Koichi Fujita put the cotton knitwear share at roughly 80 per cent in recent years.

For scale, the Ministry of Textiles told the Lok Sabha on 24 March 2026 that India’s textile and apparel exports, handicrafts included, reached Rs 3,19,573.2 crore in 2024-25. Tamil Nadu ranked first among the states in its table at Rs 67,863 crore, which is about 21 per cent of the total by tuput’s arithmetic. The ministry’s state-wise numbers come from the government’s trade statistics agency, DGCI&S, and are not the association’s numbers, so they cannot be matched line for line.

From white vests to T-shirt orders

Upstox, without naming a source, says the first knitting unit opened in Tiruppur in 1925 and that there were 230 by 1961, all making white cotton vests for the Indian market. Business Today dated the start of exports to 1978 in a report of 6 March 2011 and gave Rs 18 crore of exports in 1985. Upstox says an Italian buyer came for white T-shirts in 1978 and the retail chain C&A followed in 1981.

After that the figures climb steeply. Indian Textile Magazine’s July 2015 profile of the association says exports crossed Rs 1,000 crore in 1993, Rs 5,000 crore in 2003 and Rs 11,000 crore in 2006-07, and stood at Rs 20,730 crore in 2014-15. Upstox gives Rs 18.69 crore for 1985, Rs 289.85 crore for 1990 and Rs 3,581 crore for 2000, while Indian Textile Magazine puts 1990 at about Rs 270 crore.

The sociologist Sharad Chari, writing in World Development in 2000, found that most of the owners belong to the agrarian Gounder caste and that most had earlier worked as factory labourers. He argues that the cluster took its shape when production was reorganised into networks of small firms. Jegadeesan and Fujita describe the workforce changing in step. Early workers commuted from within 10 to 20 km. As that pool ran out, migrants came from southern Tamil Nadu districts such as Madurai, Theni and Dindigul, and after the mid-2000s from Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Bihar and Assam.

A cluster of about 20,000 units, with 100 exporters shipping half

The association describes a cluster of about 20,000 units, according to Upstox. It lists 2,500 knitting units, 810 wet processing units (360 dyeing, 50 bleaching and 400 printing), 4,200 garment makers of whom 2,500 are exporters, 1,390 finishing units and about 11,100 other ancillary units. The association was formed in 1990, had 1,316 exporter members in 2024, nine in ten of them small or medium enterprises, and about 100 of them shipped half of Tiruppur’s exports.

Employment figures grow with each source. The Supreme Court recorded in 2009, from the parties’ pleadings, that Tiruppur employed 5 lakh people (500,000). Indian Textile Magazine gave over six lakh in 2015, and the association’s June 2026 statement says more than one million. The association also describes a shortage of about 1.5 lakh workers, Upstox reports, and the Tamil Nadu government told the same June 2026 meeting that it has set aside Rs 1,250 crore over five years for hostels for women workers.

The farmers’ petition behind the zero discharge rule

In 2003 the Noyyal River Ayacutdars Protection Association, a body of farmers whose land is irrigated from the river (an ayacut is the area a dam or canal waters), petitioned the Madras High Court. It said dyeing and bleaching works at Tiruppur were putting effluent into the Noyyal, leaving the water unfit for irrigation or drinking, and filling the Orathupalayam reservoir downstream with polluted water. The Supreme Court’s judgment of 6 October 2009 sets out how the case went.

The Loss of Ecology Authority, a body that included a retired High Court judge, put the damage in an award of 17 December 2004. It counted 28,449.816 hectares of irrigated land in 68 villages across Coimbatore, Erode and Karur districts, listed 28,596 people for compensation and set the total at Rs 24,79,98,548 for 28 August 1996 to 31 December 2004. In December 2006 the High Court gave the common effluent treatment plants, or CETPs (shared plants that clean the waste of many small units), until 31 July 2007 to reach zero liquid discharge. Until then they were to pay a fine of 6, then 8, then 10 paise per litre, and any plant that missed the date faced closure and a power cut.

The industry’s counsel told the Supreme Court that members had already built 17 CETPs at a cost of about Rs 700 crore and that more than 40,000 families lived off dyeing and bleaching. The court’s own summary of the pleadings records that Tiruppur employed 5 lakh people and earned about Rs 10,000 crore a year in foreign exchange. It had stayed the closure directions in May 2007, and on 6 October 2009 it left that stay in place and gave the units three months to comply with all the High Court’s orders and pay what was due.

The judgment also records the pollution board’s inspections in July and August 2009. Eleven of the 17 CETPs had finished 90 to 97 per cent of their zero discharge works, three more had finished above 90 per cent, and three stood below 80 per cent. The court called the pollution by the units “unabated” up to that point, applied the polluter pays principle and ruled that the farmers’ compensation stood.

The 2011 closure and the reopening

On 28 January 2011, Down To Earth reported on 14 February, the High Court ordered more than 700 bleaching and dyeing units and their treatment plants closed. It asked the state to cut power to units that had not complied and said they could reopen once zero liquid discharge was verified by the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board and a court-appointed monitoring committee, with no deadline. A second Down To Earth report of 13 May 2011 gives the month of the order as February and says the court refused the owners more time on 25 March. The magazine reported that dissolved solids in the river had fallen from 5,000 to 3,000 mg per litre after the closure, against a norm of 250.

Business Standard reported on 7 December 2012, from a release by the exporters’ association, that Tiruppur had become the first textile cluster in India to achieve zero liquid discharge. The association’s president said all dyeing and processing units were using the technology, that 16 of the 18 earlier CETPs were running and that more than half the units had restarted. The paper gave the units before the closure as 494 dyeing and 162 bleaching.

How the treatment works and what it cost

Down To Earth described the method in 2011. After ordinary treatment the water goes through membrane filters, a step called reverse osmosis, that separate salts. The salty reject water is then evaporated so that nothing runs into the river. Zero discharge raised costs by 25 to 30 per cent, the magazine reported, and the evaporators needed far saltier reject water than the plants produced.

The town now reports a working system. Upstox quotes the association as saying that of the town’s 360 dyeing units, 60 built their own treatment plants and the rest share 18 common ones, which together treat 130 million litres a day and recycle 96 per cent of it. In the Mann ki Baat radio address of 30 March 2025, the Prime Minister named Tiruppur among cities dealing with textile waste, saying it does so “through wastewater treatment and renewable energy”.

What reporters and farmers still describe

Not everyone downstream accepts the town’s account. Scroll.in reported in August 2016 that a 2014 report by the Atree research institute found the reject slurry from CETPs was often dumped locally, and that villagers near the Orathupalayam dam said their groundwater was salty and dark. The Wire Science reported in February 2020 that residents and farmers alleged night-time discharges, and that land within 2 km of the river had stopped being productive. Neither piece cites a recent audit, and tuput found no independent audit of the 96 per cent figure.

What the cluster is aiming for next

The association’s target is Rs 1 lakh crore of knitwear exports by 2030, about US$10.59 billion on the exchange rate Apparel Resources used. At the June 2026 meeting the Textiles Minister urged a shift from cotton towards blended and man-made fibres and committed to support for women workers’ hostels, new clusters and newer machinery. The association asked for cotton import duty to be removed and for an extension of the RoSCTL scheme, which refunds state and central taxes on garment exports, according to the Ministry of Textiles’ own description of it.

Two trade terms changed in 2026. The India-US joint statement of 7 February 2026, as Free Press Journal published its text, set a reciprocal US tariff of 18 per cent on originating Indian goods, textile and apparel included. GOV.UK reports that the India-UK trade agreement took effect on 15 July 2026, and tuput’s report on it lists the tariff cuts. The Centre’s goal is US$100 billion of textile exports by 2030, up from US$38 billion, and Construction World reported on 3 July 2026 that the Tamil Nadu plan expects Tiruppur to supply US$11.5 billion of it.