Chetak Industries: a story from the cotton industry

The textile industry faces many challenges – from long supply chains and lack of transparency to microfibers polluting our seas. On our third field visit we met an entrepreneur whose innovation helps to battle one challenge – child labour in the cotton industry. Mansukhbhai Patel has developed a Cotton Stripper machine that automated the process of removing cotton out of its shell. It is specifically developed for the type of cotton that grows in Gujarat, his state in India.

Mansukhbhai Patel explaining how the Cotton Stripper works.

Even though he struggled a lot as a starting grassroots entrepreneur, today Mansukhbhai has a company called Chetak Industries manufacturing Cotton Stripper machines. It is marked on Google maps and located in an area where many other industrial factories are also located. The factory seemed very professional and Mansukhbhai shared his frustration that people do not see his initial struggle – he lived a financially unstable life, his children had to drop out of school to help him, he had to move out of the big city to cut costs.

At the end of the interview, I asked for a tour in his factory. He showed us where the machine is made and we saw a few men working on assembling one Cotton Stripper. Next he showed us a Cotton Stripper and showed us where the raw cotton with shells go in, explained that inside three large tubes rotate removing the shells and finally the shells and the cotton come out from two different tubes. Unfortunately this is not the cotton harvesting season so we could not see the machine fully operating.

We also visited one factory owner that had purchased the Chetak machine six-seven years ago. From him we learned that due to the machine, he works directly with farmers instead of traders and the process is much faster. In the past the farmer would deliver the cotton from the field to households where the cotton was removed manually from the shell. Then the factory owner had to go from house to house to collect the cotton. The Cotton Stripper machine has automated this process and today it is much faster than in the past.

The cotton stripper of the factory owner we met.

Of course I was also concerned about the workers whose work was replaced by the machine. The factory owner told us that he used to employ 35-40 people and with then machine that was reduced to 10-15 people. He told that the workers were not happy in the beginning, but that they had now found other jobs, which are less laborious and tedious. Mansukhbhai also explained that due to the government employment programs, people would nowadays not be willing to work as cotton strippers with a low salary. That is of course good news for him and business is going well.