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India will produce something like 25 million bales of cotton this season. That is roughly a fifth of everything grown on earth, more than the United States and Brazil, more than anywhere.
It will also import around two and a half million bales, and the part of that import bill that should embarrass us is the fine end. For extra-long staple cotton, the fibre that fine shirting is made from, Indian mills need somewhere between two and two and a half million bales a year and grow only a fraction of it themselves. Around the time the Union Budget announced a mission to fix this, the figure being quoted was that India imports about ninety per cent of the ELS cotton it uses.
So the shirt fabric woven in Coimbatore, for a shirt stitched in Bengaluru, sold in Delhi, is quite likely made from cotton grown in Arizona or the Nile Delta.
How big the gap actually is
The US Department of Agriculture's post in New Delhi puts Indian ELS cultivation at about 200,000 hectares across central and southern India, mostly under the DCH-32 and MCU-5 hybrids, producing somewhere near 320,000 bales. Against a requirement several times that.
The gap is filled mainly from the United States, with Australia and Brazil supplying the broader cotton shortfall. American Pima — Supima, when it is certified and branded — is the largest single source, and imports of it climbed after the import duty on ELS cotton was removed.
There is a further layer to this that the aggregate numbers hide. "Extra-long staple" in Indian usage starts at 30 to 32.5 mm, and a good deal of what gets counted is interspecific hybrid cotton at the lower end of that band. The genuinely fine material, above 35 mm, is a much smaller number again. That is the fibre that makes shirting worth talking about, and India grows very little of it.
It isn't a knowledge problem
The frustrating part is that India solved this once already, deliberately, and then let the solution go.
The breeding programme that produced Suvin was set up precisely because India had no fine cotton of its own and was spending foreign exchange it could not spare on Egyptian and Sudanese fibre. Sujata came first in 1969, then Suvin in 1974, crossing Sujata with the Sea Island variety St Vincent at Coimbatore. On release Suvin was rated the equal of Giza 45, which was the best cotton Egypt exported and exactly what India had been buying.
It worked. India had built, from scratch, a cotton in the top tier in the world.
In the 1980s the country grew 35,000 to 40,000 bales of it a year. The figure now is closer to 1,500.
Why the farmer walked away
Nothing about this was a failure of demand. Japanese mills have wanted every kilo of Suvin they could get for decades, and still do.
It was a failure of arithmetic on the farm, and it is worth being precise about it rather than romantic. Suvin belongs to Gossypium barbadense, which behaves nothing like the hybrid cotton that dominates Indian fields. It stands in the ground for around 225 days rather than roughly 160. It needs assured irrigation in a country where the monsoon has become less predictable. It is badly exposed to sucking pests. And it yields perhaps seven to eight quintals an acre against ten to twelve for medium staple.
Then Bt hybrids arrived after 2002 and gave farmers a crop that was shorter, hardier and more profitable. Acreage moved, and barbadense fell to a rounding error in the national planting figures.
Nobody decided to abandon Suvin. It simply lost, season after season, to a crop that paid better. Which is what happens to any variety whose quality is worth a great deal to a mill and very little to the person who has to grow it.
That is the actual mechanism, and it applies well beyond cotton. A fibre can be the best in the world and still disappear, because the value it creates and the person carrying the risk are separated by four or five links in a supply chain.
What is being done
Two things, and they point the same direction.
The government sets a minimum support price for every cotton it buys, and Suvin's is the highest in the country — ₹9,867 a quintal for 2026-27, against ₹8,667 for long staple and ₹8,267 for medium. That is the state's own assessment of what the fibre is worth, and it is an attempt to make the arithmetic work at the farm gate rather than only at the mill.
And in May 2026 the Union Cabinet approved a five-year Mission for Cotton Productivity, ₹5,659 crore across 2026-27 to 2030-31, with promotion of ELS cotton written in as an explicit objective and self-sufficiency in premium fibre as the stated goal.
Whether it works depends on whether an ELS crop can be made to pay a farmer in Salem as well as a Bt hybrid does. Support prices help only if there is a buyer at the other end who has committed in advance, which is why the contract farming arrangements that keep the remaining Suvin alive matter more than they look.
Why any of this should matter to someone buying a shirt
Mostly it shouldn't. A good shirt is a good shirt regardless of where the cotton grew, and Supima and Giza are excellent fibres.
But there is something odd about a country that grows a fifth of the world's cotton and cannot dress its own people in the best of it. The finest fibre India produces goes almost entirely to Japan. The finest shirting sold in India is largely woven from cotton that crossed an ocean to get here.
None of that is anyone's scandal. It is just the ordinary result of a lot of separate rational decisions, each of which made sense to the person making it.
It also seems like a reasonable thing to want to change, one fabric at a time.
Sources
India cotton production, ELS area and output, and import sources: USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Cotton and Products Annual, New Delhi. fas.usda.gov
World production and trade figures: USDA Economic Research Service, Cotton and Wool Outlook. ers.usda.gov
Suvin's breeding history, 1974 release, and benchmarking against Giza 45: Status & Prospects: Extra Long Staple Cotton Production in India, ICAR-CICR, published by the Cotton Association of India, February 2025. caionline.in
Suvin's decline, cultivation area and the agronomic reasons for it: So long, Suvin, Down To Earth. downtoearth.org.in
Minimum support prices for 2026-27. fibre2fashion.com
Mission for Cotton Productivity, Cabinet approval and outlay: Press release, Prime Minister's Office, May 2026. pmindia.gov.in
The ninety per cent import dependency figure was widely reported in coverage of the Union Budget 2025-26 ELS cotton mission announcement.