Every morning, dozens of buses arrive with relentless regularity at the high security gates of the Netaji Apparel Park, in Tirupur. This is a brand new, spic-and-span 'Industrial Estate' at the outer bounds of the old town. The buses come from all directions, having snaked their ways through miles and miles of dusty village tracks, with the precise, measured tread of an army convoy ferrying soldiers to a remote war post. At their destination, their blaring klaxons temporarily silenced by the screaming wails of banshee sirens, they disgorge hundreds of villagers. These are mostly young women, who disappear into the large factory complexes lurking behind imposing, fortified gates, entirely masking the view inside. At every gate, a visitor is liable to find a torn-off piece of cardboard carton inscribed with two prominent legends: Labour Wanted and No Child Labour. Both are telling in their own way. The people consumed by this giant apparatus will emerge in due course – some after eight hours, but the majority after 12, perhaps 16 hours, trooping back into their allotted buses, to be ferried back to their village homes.
Welcome to Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, also known variously as Knit City, T-Shirt City and sometimes even Dollar City. This is perhaps the only urban area in India with negative unemployment, with more jobs here than there are people. It is for this reason that factories here are forced to haul in their workforce from as far as 60 kilometres away. Over the past two decades, Tirupur's growth has been exponential, rising from annual export revenue of INR 750 million in 1987 to more than INR 110 billion last year. In more ways than one, Tirupur has largely become the beacon of New India.
In a pioneering 2004 study of the town and its business triumph, Sharad Chari, of the London School of Economics, attributed Tirupur's success to what he calls "Gounder toil". The Gounders are a Tamil-speaking community of landowning peasants, whose cultural homestead is in the region of Kongunadu, in northwest Tamil Nadu. In the local construction for 'toil', Chari uses the term ulaippu, which is distinct from the Tamil for 'work'. He notes that the Tirupur peasant was quick to adapt first to cotton farming during the 1920s, and before long there were several flourishing Gounder estates, or thottams, feeding the spinning mills in Coimbatore. The Gounder peasants also evolved an intricate system through which to work their thottams, using both unpaid family labour and indentured Dalit workers.
The Gounders were game to get their own hands dirty as well, and actively took part in the labour. This work ethic coalesced into an intricate, informal, quasi-legal lending mechanism – a unique and crucial system of kinship-based venture funding. It allowed other apprentice clansmen to set up their own businesses. Migrant workers slowly became factory owners, which helped in the transition to small industry when the time was right. So much so that, when the rest of the agricultural and commodities markets collapsed during the economic depression of the 1930s, Tirupur grew by 117 percent in that same period. Decades later, during the 1970s and 1980s, Western retailers began to arrive, scouting for cheaper production sources – and they found that Tirupur was ready. It has always been a city that responds to challenge with innovation.