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Better Cotton Backs Initiative in India to Elevate Cotton’s Profile 

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Photo credit: CITI CDRA. Location: New Delhi, India, 2024. Description: Manish Gupta (left) and Jyoti Narain Kapoor (middle) of Better Cotton participate in signing of MoU with Mr Sunil Patwari, Chairman of Texprocil (right), in the presence of Hon. Union Cabinet Minister of Textiles Shri Giriraj Singh. 

Better Cotton has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with The Cotton Textiles Export Promotion Council (TEXPROCIL) of India to promote quality, home-grown cotton globally. 

Last year, TEXPROCIL teamed up with the Government of India and its Ministry of Textile to launch ‘Kasturi Cotton’, the country’s first-ever branded cotton designed to reflect high-quality fibre.  

This collaboration offers the best of both worlds in the cotton sector: with Better Cotton a standard for sustainability and Kasturi a recognised standard1 for fibre quality, this partnership aims to demonstrate that sustainability goes hand-in-hand with high-quality cotton.  

Our collaboration with TEXPROCIL will help shine a spotlight on Indian cotton and its impressive credentials. It also creates the opportunity for companies to secure higher prices for the cotton they sell by aligning with both the Better Cotton and Kasturi Cotton standards.

Jyoti Narain Kapoor, Director of Better Cotton’s India Programme

This collaboration unites two critical initiatives: sustainability and higher quality standards. Together, they will elevate Indian cotton and shape the future of cotton production in India.

Dr Siddhartha Rajagopal, Executive Director at TEXPROCIL

Better Cotton will help promote Kasturi Cotton by encouraging its network to align with the Kasturi Cotton Standard to demonstrate the high quality of the Better Cotton they sell. 

As per the MoU’s terms, TEXPROCIL has committed to providing training to Better Cotton Member gins keen to align with the Kasturi Cotton programme. It will also highlight Better Cotton’s mission among its network of more than 2,000 companies across India’s textile manufacturing regions to drive engagement with the sustainability initiative. 

Better Cotton can in turn look to engage more cotton gins across India, outline the benefits of sourcing more sustainable cotton and aim to boost uptake within the country’s supply chains.  

The pair will collaboratively develop a series of workshops for cotton gins across the country both to educate around sustainability in cotton production and outline the benefits of alignment with their respective programmes. 

  1. To align with the Kasturi Cotton programme, cotton gins participate in independent bale testing to verify that their cotton meets this benchmark for softness, brightness, strength, durability, and purity. The programme also provides supply chain traceability using blockchain technology to monitor the movement of verified cotton throughout the value chain.        

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