Nishanth Chopra: Rebuilding regenerative seed-to-sew fashion systems rooted in community (ep307)
What are regenerative, seed-to-sow fashion systems? And what should we know about India's ongoing, historic farmer protests—and how it disproportionately impacts those most influenced by the Green Revolution?
In this episode, we welcome Nishanth Chopra, the visionary behind Oshadi (IG @Oshadi_Collective), which is rebuilding regenerative, artisanal fashion and textiles system. They value the Earth, nurture the soil, and respect their community of farmers, spinners, dyers, weavers, makers, and designers first and foremost. They aim to give back more than they take and to produce the finest organic clothing and textiles using ancient cotton farming techniques.
Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Jake Gauntlett
“I don’t understand how people ended up creating this ‘living’ wage or ‘minimum’ wage. Who can decide what the ‘minimum’ wage is for someone else? Who can decide what a ‘living’ wage is for someone else?”
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Transcript
Note: Green Dreamer is a community-powered multimedia journal exploring our paths to collective healing, ecological regeneration, and true abundance and wellness for all. The values, views, and opinions of our diverse guests do not necessarily reflect those of Green Dreamer. Please do your own additional research on the information, resources, and statistics shared. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to start by hearing a little bit about your background. What got you interested in textiles, and what inspired you to start Oshadi Collective?
Nishanth Chopra: My family has been in textiles for the last 60 to 65 years. I also was brought up in a textile hub. So as I grew up, I knew that I was going to end up doing something with textiles.
When I finished my education, I studied in England. One of the courses I took was about sustainability in the 21st century. It opened up these different perspectives for me on things like how to treat people and how to treat the environment. I already had a love for nature within me, but when I got back to India, I started thinking more about the textile industry. I realized that with the mass production and chemicals, there was so much going on in the industry that was degrading the relationships we have with human beings and with the environment.
So I decided that I would work with the rural craft techniques of India because they were really sustainable. Even though they are ancient, they had a very modern approach in terms of slow making, using hand-spun, handwoven materials. The farming techniques there were also traditional and organic.
That's how we started. We launched as a womenswear brand, and we were curious about how to improve our supply chain. So we started exploring the materials and then we realized the dyes were not okay. So we started working with different dyes – natural dyes, organic dyes – and then we realized that our materials come from a farm that uses chemicals. So no matter how much we do in terms of dying, it still has to change from the ground up.
I watched a Tamil movie that pushed me to start farming the very next day. The next day I woke up and was like I need to start farming. So we started a small five-acre farm a couple of years ago.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to go more into what you're working on shortly, but first, I'd love to touch on the farmer protests. As we're speaking, farmers across India are protesting as part of a historic farmer's protest and people's movement globally. On November 26th, 2020, a nationwide general strike of about 250 million people took place in support of the farmer unions.
A lot of people are aware that these protests are going on, but being there in India, working with and alongside farmers, what can you tell us about why these protests are happening right now?
Nishanth Chopra: I think the protests are happening because of the new bills that were passed—which I personally think are forward-thinking but just lack the right foundation.
For example, they criminalized the burning of farm residue, which is one of the biggest sources of pollution in India. Six of the most polluted cities in the world are in India. And five of those cities are the places where people are protesting. The protests are mainly based around Haryana and Punjab. There's a lot of burning residue after every harvest.
But what would farmers do if something's criminalized, but they don't have the assets, the resources, the knowledge to find a new solution for what to do with the residue? They are just left helpless because if they burn it, they get criminalized, and if they don't, what would they do with the residue? It’s very expensive for them to clean the farm after every harvest, so automatically, what they do is after everything dries out, they just burn it.
The second most important thing was the free market. The government was like, you don't really have to sell in our authorized centers, but you can sell to anyone you want. It's a very free market. But they didn't keep a minimum rate.
So again, I think these were really forward-thinking bills without the right foundation.
There were some solutions where the government would clean up residues and so forth. But there's a huge population in India, so helping one town or helping one specific place doesn't mean that you're helping the entire region. So I think [the protest mostly involves farmers in] specifically those regions, Haryana and Punjab, which after the Green Revolution, adopted these chemicals quicker than any other state in India.
For example, if you see where I live (in Tamil Nadu), people still follow traditional farming practices in concert with chemical farming. So you can see half and half of both on the same farm. They still put out organic compost, but they use pesticides.
But farmers in Punjab and Haryana completely rely on chemicals. And they've been doing so for the last 60 years since the Green Revolution. So the knowledge of traditional farming has been lost.
And it's very difficult for farmers to think, ‘Can this be done without chemicals or without residue burning or things like that?’
Kamea Chayne: We previously welcomed Vandana Shiva on the show and she talked about the Green Revolution in India that devastated a lot of farmers. The Green Revolution led to a lot of agro-biodiversity loss because farmers were encouraged to focus on high-yield crop varieties and adopt agrochemicals like pesticides.
These changes put a lot of farmers in debt and made them reliant on using chemicals from the chemical giants and big agriculture. This transition may also be correlated with the spike in suicide rates among farmers in India—because it constantly put them in cycles of debt.
So it sounds like because farmers have become so reliant on these external resources, alongside their continuing struggles in the wake of the Green Revolution, they don't have the foundation to deal with the changes that have been implemented. Am I understanding this correctly?
Nishanth Chopra: That's absolutely right. And the movie I mentioned that inspired me to farm: It revolves around the life of this farmer. He works really hard for 25 years to buy a piece of land. And buying a piece of land is a privilege in India, because it says something about the status you have in society. If you have a piece of land, it means that you're better off than the majority of the population who doesn't own land.
So that farmer, he buys a piece of land, he builds a house and he starts farming there. And as he keeps farming, he starts doing chemical farming, and he gets a loan to buy these chemicals. In the first season with the chemicals, he has a good harvest. But as the seasons go on, the amount of chemicals he has to use keeps building up and up and up because the soil starts building a tolerance.
It’s just like any addiction that a human being could have—you build a tolerance, and then you need more of the substance. It's very similar to chemical farming. There comes a point when the farmer is not able to afford to farm anymore because he's in such great debt to fertilizer companies.
And eventually, in the last scene of the movie, he's just sitting. He sold the land to the same chemical company he was indebted to because he was not able to pay back the debt.
Even in the current era, it happens to so many farmers in India. That's why if you had land and now you've lost it, people consider it a shame in society. That's why they often commit suicide—because they go from this place of living in a house and sending their kids to a good school to, all of a sudden, everything is lost, and they're on the streets again.
A lot of people can't bear that burden, the kind of shame it brings to them, and they commit suicide. And that's why the highest suicide rates are among farmers in India.
Kamea Chayne: So today, you run a regenerative farm in support of Oshadi Collective. How common is regenerative agriculture across India? And how might the bills that many farmers are protesting right now impact you differently because you're not reliant on big ag and the agrochemical companies?
Nishanth Chopra:
“Regenerative” is a new term for an ancient way of doing things. India has been practicing regenerative agriculture for as long as there's been civilization. There was always multicropping; there was always crop rotation. People just didn't use those words.
But I think it's been a really long time since India was farming like this. It was easy for us to adopt and adapt our farmland to regenerative practices because in the place I am from, there are a lot of people who have a wealth of knowledge, especially the older people, because their parents lived before the Green Revolution and practiced all these techniques: the farming techniques, the composting techniques, the land preparation techniques, the cultivating techniques, the harvesting techniques. All of these regenerative things: low-tilling, no-tilling. This stuff was common practice. I was fortunate to meet these people.
So we learned from them, and we incorporated those techniques.
It’s a lot of trial and error because there's no book about what works here. Regenerative agriculture has different definitions within different climates, soil conditions, places. You can't have a one-size-fits-all solution.
It’s about mimicking the nature around you, which is simultaneously the easiest thing to do and also a really tough thing to do because as a society, we’ve transitioned to the conventional way of doing things with chemicals. Just going and convincing a farmer that, hey, you can grow things without buying anything – with just cow dung – people say, whoa, this guy's crazy. How can you just grow things with cow dung or organic compost?
Kamea Chayne: On that note, in the greater fashion industry today, there are a lot of large Western fashion houses and corporations that mass produce their clothing in “developing” countries like India. How does this relationship reflect India's colonial history? And what has been the significance for you of challenging the dominant industry in all sorts of ways – from slowing the production cycle down to honoring ancient practices and ancient crafts to building a seed-to-fiber-to-fashion brand that's all based in India and that you have complete agency and autonomy to manage?
Nishanth Chopra: I think that—not just the fashion industry—all the industries have always found places to make things for cheap. It's been a practice for as long as anyone can remember—if you're able to make something cheaper in China or India, you should make it there. Also, people think of the workers who live in China and India as disposable. You could use a person and if he doesn't cater to your rates, you would find a cheaper person. So you'd kick that person out.
It's a mindset that is so inhumane. You look at those people like machines that produce something for you. There are people working for hours and hours and hours every day for years to make a fabric or to embroider a fabric or weave a fabric.
It’s a really preconceived, deeply ingrained idea that if people see brown skin, if they see someone who doesn't live the kind of lifestyle you’d find in the US or the UK, if they see someone who lives in a small shack, they build this relationship of extraction.
It’s really a mistake on both sides because the people in India always gave in—they accepted that kind of exploitation. But I think that this kind of relationship is starting to change with education. A lot of young people are educated in the US or the UK, and they come back and they're like, ‘Whoa, this is not right. This kind of relationship is not right.’
I had a realization where I was like, ‘I'm not a supplier. I'm not a machine. I'm not making things for someone. We are working together. It's a collaboration.’
It takes a lot of time to make just one meter of fabric, let alone a whole dress, in India. You could go to L.A. or London and you could sell that. But making fabric is such a difficult task. You can imagine the women on the farm, they're bending down every day for nine hours in scorching heat, picking the cotton. That cotton then goes to spinning mills, where there are so many young people spinning it who are really underpaid. There are so many young people from rural India who don't understand what a minimum wage is; they get convinced or lured into weaving things at a cheap rate or dyeing things, putting their hands into these toxic dyes.
It starts with the farm, and it keeps rolling over and over and over again until it reaches a consumer. As soon as it reaches the consumer, that kind of thought follows through, and the consumer disposes of the same piece of clothing very quickly.
It's this kind of relationship which we are trying to change right from the soil. So we work with brands as partners all the way back to the farm. We tell them, ‘Hey, this is how much time it takes to farm.’ Then we get to spinning, and we change that relationship too. We are nowhere closer to where we want to be. But it’s a start. It's a start for us to make sure we bring about the right changes and fair income distribution throughout the supply chain.
It's really difficult because we still pay some of the unskilled farmers 350 rupees a day. Even though the local rate is 200 rupees, 350 rupees is only five dollars and per month, it's like 150 dollars, which is a lot for an unskilled farmer in India but still not a lot of money. It's way more than the minimum wage, but not a ton of money. I don't understand how people ended up creating the “living” wage, this “minimum” wage.
Who is to decide what the “minimum” wage is for someone else? Who is to decide what a “living” wage is for someone else? People have created these really unfair systems to exploit a very small percentage of people so that they can have a lavish life.
They don't acknowledge the person struggling to eat or to get access to good healthcare or a good education. These relationships are really strange. I don't really know how we ended up creating this really bizarre system of exploitation and unfairness.
But I think things are changing now with education, the internet, and exposure.
Kamea Chayne: To connect your work with the farmer protests, I spoke with some frontline farmer protest activists earlier today—people from the Trolley Times, which is a biweekly newsletter reporting from the protests, essentially so that the protestors can share their own stories of what they're dealing with and what is happening.
What was really beautiful, that they mentioned, is that a lot of people who are engaged in the movement have abandoned the extractive and capitalistic ways of being that are encouraged by the dominant system – as in all the people protesting are taking care of each other and are making sure that everyone has food to eat and is taken care of. It sparked this sort of gifting and sharing economy and built a strong sense of community and unity among the citizens who are engaged in this movement.
I know that community and collaboration are things that you really value at Oshadi Collective. So I wonder if you can speak to how you're incorporating these values into your work and how you think that may carry you and the farmers and artisans that you work with through challenging times—especially when you're confronting powerful interests, whether it's in the fashion industry or with big agriculture.
Nishanth Chopra: That's exactly what we try to do. We are not building an employee-company relationship or a worker-company relationship with our artisans or our farmers or anyone who works in our supply chain. It's a very different relationship because they get to have a say in how much they'd like to be paid. We work on a very different payment model. We have this three-part ratio where a third of our income goes to the makers. The second part of our income goes to the company, and the third part is our profit.
So we don't really have a minimum wage; we have a minimum amount that someone has to be paid, but all the people we work with get paid at least two or three times what the government-set minimum wage is.
We built a system during COVID in which when a tailor or an artisan or a weaver doesn't have specific work, they can do replacement work. In other words, we train them to do a separate thing. That's how things were back in the day in India. If you think about back when there was a rural economy in India, there was an exchange of work: The same family who was farming cotton would spin the cotton, also weave the cotton, also make clothing, and then also sell the clothing in the local economy. I thought that that was such a good idea, because we would not be able to provide consistent work; we don't get a consistent order from a brand that we promise things for, that would be buying things from us every season for the next few years.
So we train all of the people who work with us to do everything. For example, when the tailors don’t have a lot of work, they help us out with quality control. The quality control people can also weave, the weavers can also work on the farm, and the farmers can also weave. So we are creating this community.
If you remember, early in COVID, like during March, it was a proper lockdown. We had twenty or so acres on which the land was prepared and that we'd invested a lot of money in. And we got an agricultural permit from the government to farm on that land.
You won't believe it, but everyone from our company, whether they were a weaver or a tailor or a seamstress, everyone was working on the farm to make sure that there was a proper irrigation system. We followed all the COVID guidelines, and we were not allowed to go on certain premises, and there were minimal people working on the farm, and in order to be there, we all had to live in the same locality. But this kind of exchange and this community we built is so resilient. We don't have issues with orders or things like that because there's always something to do—different processes or parts of the supply chain to address.
Kamea Chayne: I really love that. Thank you so much for sharing this, and certainly, the entire fashion industry has so much to learn from your leadership and this relocalization of the textile supply chain that you're building.
Before we wrap up, what else would you like to share with our listeners that I didn't get to ask you about? And do you have any calls to action for them that you want to share?
Nishanth Chopra:
To me, sustainability is intention. Just because there's a new term, like “regenerative”, it doesn’t mean that all brands need to adopt it just because it's going to drive profitability. There has to be an intention to actually change.
That's when real change can happen—when we can move towards a fairer world. So I think that's what I would say: Have the right intentions when you start building relationships.
Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. I just have three fire round closing questions for you before we wrap up. What is an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Nishanth Chopra: It’s a book that talks about how we evolved as a civilization. It feels very ephemeral, like this color cast. And it told the story of us being these wild human beings – from the foragers scavenging in the forest and then how we evolved into the systems we’ve created, the clothes we wear, the image we have of ourselves as human beings and as these superior beings. It makes everything that’s superficial feel irrelevant and shows that we’re just another being on the planet.
Kamea Chayne: What do you tell yourself to stay motivated and inspired?
Nishanth Chopra: It's a privilege to just wake up and do what I'm doing now and be in a place. And I think just being in this place is a sign of hope for me to carry on what I'm doing.
Kamea Chayne: And what makes you most hopeful for our planet and world at the moment?
Nishanth Chopra: I think there's a lot of talk about change and a lot of positivity. If you go on Instagram, everyone wants to change, especially after COVID. There's been such a profound amount of self-reflection and a lot of people have come out of this with intentions to make things better. I think it's a sign of positivity and hope and a starting point for change.
Kamea Chayne: Nishanth, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. I’m so, so glad to get to have this conversation with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Nishanth Chopra: Just having collaborative relationships in anything we do, with whoever we work with, is huge. If you have a collaborative and intimate relationship, it could change everything. We don't really have to follow agendas or terms. A better relationship and an understanding of the other person really changes things.
