Jute: the world's biggest producer that barely exports

India grows roughly 60 per cent of the world's jute, more than any other country. On production alone, that would read as dominance. It isn't, because production and export are two different markets, and India's jute barely touches the second one: Bangladesh, the world's number-two jute producer, accounts for about 70 per cent of global jute exports and is widely regarded as producing the higher-quality fibre. India processes almost all of what it grows domestically instead.

The reason is a specific piece of legislation, not market drift. The Jute Packaging Materials (Compulsory Use in Packing Commodities) Act, 1987 requires the government to mandate jute packaging for certain commodities, and the reservation in the most recent order this piece found — a Ministry of Textiles order (S.O. 1830(E)) dated 22 April 2025, valid only to 30 June 2025, with no later order located — required 100 per cent of foodgrains and 20 per cent of sugar production to be packed in jute bags, with the Ministry retaining discretion to relax the norm by up to 30 per cent during supply shortages. The government buys jute bags worth about ₹12,000 crore a year under this mandate, and the reservation is credited with supporting about 4 lakh workers in jute mills and allied units and 40 lakh farm families, according to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs’ decision for 2023-24 (the ₹7,500 crore and 7 lakh workers first used here were 2020 figures). This is a captive domestic market created by statute, not a fibre that wins orders against synthetic or Bangladeshi competition on price or quality — which is precisely why it has never had to develop an export capability the way Bangladesh's jute sector has.

Even that captive market hasn't stopped production from declining. National raw jute output fell from about 97.6 lakh bales (180 kg each) in 2021-22 to roughly 91.8 lakh bales more recently, with one industry estimate citing 83.08 lakh bales against a prior year's 92.52 lakh — the range across sources reflects normal crop-year revision, not a single disputed number. West Bengal grows about half of India's raw jute and hosts 89 of the country's 120 composite jute mills as of December 2025, making the state's jute belt close to a company-town arrangement for the whole sector. The stated cause of the production slide is farmer economics: jute prices routinely ran below the Minimum Support Price for years, and farmers shifted acreage to maize, which offered better and more assured realisation through the poultry-feed and ethanol markets. The Jute Corporation of India has responded by raising MSP substantially — from ₹5,335 to ₹5,650 a quintal for 2025-26, and to ₹5,925 a quintal for 2026-27, a cumulative 147 per cent increase since 2014-15 — but a rising floor price on a crop whose only real buyer is a government mandate is a different intervention from making the fibre competitive on its own terms.

Silk: the volume grew for a decade, and India still imports the grade it needs most

India's raw silk story looks, at first glance, like a genuine success. National production rose from about 26,000 tonnes in 2014 to 42,033 tonnes in 2025-26 — up 2.22 per cent year-on-year in the most recent Central Silk Board count, and up roughly 60 per cent over the decade. Mulberry cultivation area expanded to about 269,670–276,231 hectares (figures vary slightly by reporting date), and Karnataka remains the leading producing state. Sericulture employs an estimated 9.76 million people across more than 52,500 villages in FY25, which makes it one of the largest rural livelihood programmes attached to any single fibre in India.

The gap is in grade, not volume. India's silk output splits into mulberry silk (32,250 tonnes) and non-mulberry "Vanya" silks — tasar, eri and muga — which actually fell 2.19 per cent to 9,783 tonnes in the same year. Within mulberry silk, the higher-quality bivoltine grade, the type power-loom weaving and export-grade fabric actually need, rose a strong 10.52 per cent to 11,229 tonnes — but that is still a minority of total mulberry output. Most Indian cocoons remain multivoltine, a lower, hand-reeling-grade silk that does not substitute cleanly for bivoltine in industrial weaving. That grade mismatch, not a shortage of raw tonnage, is why India still imports upward of $150 million of raw silk a year — about 27.8 lakh kilograms in one recent year cited, sourced mainly from Vietnam (~$96 million) and China (~$59 million) — even while ranking as the world's second-largest silk producer after China. A country can lead global production and still be a structural importer, if what it grows and what its own industry needs are two different products.

Wool: a large flock, a shrinking output, and a quality problem with a name

Wool inverts the silk story in one respect and repeats it in another. India holds 74.26 million sheep (20th Livestock Census, 2019), second or third in the world depending on the source, but annual wool production was only 33.69 million kilograms in 2023-24 (Basic Animal Husbandry Statistics 2024). Despite that, raw wool imports reached 92.2 million kilograms in 2023-24, surpassing pre-Covid levels, with roughly 18 per cent sourced from Australia (consistent with Australian Wool Innovation’s reporting, but not checked against DGCI&S data) and the rest substantially from New Zealand and other suppliers. India imports more raw wool by weight than it produces domestically.

The stated reason again centres on grade rather than headcount. Even where the national sheep count has held up, numbers fell between the 2012 and 2019 livestock censuses in several of the traditional wool-producing states — Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan (from 9.1 million to 7.9 million), Gujarat and Jammu & Kashmir — and pastoralist grazing land has shrunk under land-use change and climate pressure, restricting the seasonal flock movements that traditional wool-rearing depends on. Layered on top of that is a specific, named quality failure: inbreeding has degraded the carpet- and apparel-grade wool India's flocks produce, to the point that domestic wool increasingly cannot substitute for the imported grades the textile industry actually specifies. The pattern is the same shape as silk's bivoltine gap — a large domestic base that does not produce enough of the specific grade its own downstream industry needs — even though the underlying animal-husbandry story (population decline, land-use pressure) is genuinely different from silk's breeding-programme story.

Everything else: banana, pineapple leaf, hemp, nettle — real fibre, early-stage industry

Beyond cotton (covered in this blog's earlier piece), jute, silk and wool, India's handloom sector has long used a wider basket of natural fibres — banana, pineapple leaf, hemp, ramie, Himalayan nettle and bamboo-derived cellulosic fibre — and the Ministry of Textiles funds research and development on several of them under its "Scheme for Research and Development for the Textile Industry including Jute." Coir, the coconut-husk fibre, is covered separately on this blog and is not repeated here.

The clearest opportunity on paper is banana fibre: India is the world's largest producer of bananas, which mechanically makes it the country with the largest potential feedstock for banana-stem fibre, currently used mostly in niche handloom and sustainable-fashion applications rather than at industrial scale. Northeast India is repeatedly named in government and industry material as well-positioned for banana, pineapple-leaf, ramie and other allied fibres specifically, given existing cultivation of the underlying crops in the region. India's broader sustainable-fashion market, which is where most of this alternative-fibre activity currently sits commercially, was valued at about $272.51 million in 2024, with one projection putting it at $1.6 billion by 2033 — a real but still small base relative to jute, silk or wool. This piece did not find production-volume data for banana, pineapple-leaf or hemp fibre in India at anything like the granularity available for jute, silk or wool, which is itself informative: these fibres remain in an R&D and niche-brand phase, not a tracked national commodity market.

Two different failure modes, not one

It would be tidy to describe jute, silk and wool as one story about India under-monetising its natural-fibre base. They are not the same problem. Jute's issue is a captive, statutorily mandated domestic market that has never had to compete on export terms, sitting alongside a genuine farm-economics problem (below-MSP prices pushing farmers to maize) that a rising MSP addresses directly but a lack of export competitiveness does not. Silk and wool share a different problem: aggregate production has grown or stayed large, but the specific grade the downstream industry actually needs — bivoltine cocoons, apparel-grade fleece — remains a minority share of that output, so the country imports the grade gap even while it leads or ranks highly on total volume. Treating "more raw material" as the fix would help jute's farmers directly; it would not, by itself, close either the bivoltine gap in silk or the inbreeding-driven quality gap in wool, because the volume was never the constraint in those two cases.

What would fix this

• The Ministry of Textiles should publish, with the same detail as the JPM Act reservation percentages, a comparable target and timeline for jute's export competitiveness — not just the domestic packaging mandate. A sector whose only stated success metric is a captive government order book has no way to show it is becoming exportable.
• The Central Silk Board should publish state- and district-level bivoltine-versus-multivoltine cocoon shares, not just the national aggregate used in this piece, so extension programmes can target the specific districts where the grade gap is worst rather than applying a uniform national push.
• The wool sector's inbreeding problem needs a named, funded breed-improvement programme with a published baseline — the diagnosis (inbreeding degrading carpet- and apparel-grade wool) is already in the public record; this piece did not find a correspondingly specific, funded remediation programme to cite against it.
• Banana, pineapple-leaf and hemp fibre need a tracked national production statistic, the way jute, silk and wool already have one, before any claim about their commercial potential can be checked against reality rather than a research-scheme description.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.