The day after the Flag is hoisted, its makers are still waiting

The celebrations have come to an end. The flags remain. By this morning, the little tricolours that marked Independence Day can be found crumpled on roadsides and in piles of waste—symbols of the nation reduced, within hours, to discarded material. The sight is unsettling not merely because of what it appears to say about our relationship with a national symbol, but because of what happens when that symbol is made of something like polyester. What looks like a small piece of patriotic celebration can become a synthetic waste problem long for the country. And behind the flag's brief public life lies a much larger story—of material, labour, livelihoods and the people who make the symbol before the nation salutes it.

What happens when patriotism enters the waste stream? And beneath that discarded piece of cloth lies another, less visible story — of the material that replaced khadi, the workers whose livelihoods depend on it, and the economy of labour behind the flag we salute.

A flag is never merely a piece of cloth. Across societies, it becomes a visual shorthand for sovereignty, territory, belonging and collective identity; its colours and forms acquire meaning through memory, ritual and political history. Flags have been used time and again to assert sovereignty against one common enemy in wars and then to commemorate peace after those wars.

India's tricolour carries a similar dense historical vocabulary — of the freedom struggle, sacrifice, sovereignty.

Yet every symbol also has a material life. Before the tricolour is raised, saluted or discarded, someone has to make it.

A flag compresses history, memory, territory and political experience. Into an object that individuals can recognise as belonging to something larger than themselves. Its power is therefore both sociological and psychological: repeated through ceremonies, public spaces and moments of collective mourning or celebration, the flag can turn an abstract idea of the nation into something visible, intimate and emotionally experienced. India's tricolour carries precisely this accumulated meaning, its visual grammar invoking secular-pluralist identity and the sovereignty of the Republic. The paradox is that the more immaterial meanings a flag acquires, the easier it is to forget its material life. Before it becomes a national symbol, it is still cloth—spun, woven, dyed and stitched by human hands.

When cloth became a politics of freedom

The history of India's national flag cannot be separated from the history. For Gandhi, khadi was not simply fabric; it was an economic argument about who should produce, who should earn and what freedom should mean to the poorest Indian. Its purpose was to generate supplementary employment for underemployed rural workers, raise purchasing power and keep productive wealth within villages rather than allowing labour and resources to be concentrated in industrial centres.

That is why the charkha became such a potent instrument of the freedom movement. Spinning connected the producer to the consumer and transformed an ordinary act of making cloth into an act of swadeshi and economic resistance. Gandhi's conception of khadi was explicitly labour-intensive and decentralised: the village was to remain a productive economic unit, while manual labour was to carry neither social nor economic inferiority. The charkha was consequently imagined not merely as an anti-British symbol but as an instrument of employment, self-reliance and dignity.

The Charkha Sangh, according to the historical data distributed more than Rs.7 crore in wages to about 4.5 lakh spinners and weavers across 20,000 villages over 25 years. Gandhi's economic proposition was therefore grounded in a material question: how could political freedom be meaningful if millions remained economically dependent or underemployed?

Yet independent India's textile history moved increasingly in another direction. In the early years after 1947, mills were already producing roughly three-quarters of India's cotton cloth, while handlooms accounted for the remaining quarter. The subsequent state-backed expansion of powerlooms fundamentally altered that balance. The 1974 High Powered Study Team on the Problems of the Handloom Industry found that every new powerloom put six handlooms out of action, by then, the expansion of mechanised production had already displaced large numbers of handloom workers.

The transition was followed by another: cotton gave way to synthetics, with polyester becoming a major force in the textile economy.The 1985 New Textile Policy explicitly sought to expand synthetic fibre and yarn production while making cloth available at reasonable prices. The logic was industrial efficiency and affordability. According to the historical account in powerlooms now account for about 60% of India's cloth production, compared with 15% for handlooms.

The national flag eventually became part of this longer story of mechanisation. On December 30, 2021, the Union government amended the Flag Code of India, replacing the earlier material restriction with a provision allowing the national flag to be made of hand-spun and hand-woven or machine-made cotton, polyester, wool or silk khadi bunting.

The change may appear technical. Historically, it is anything but so. The fabric of the flag had moved from being a political statement about self-reliance to becoming another site of the country's unresolved tension between labour-intensive production and industrial efficiency.

The policy change therefore did not remain confined to the pages of the Flag Code. It reached the godowns of India's traditional flag-makers. In Karnataka, the institution that had long produced khadi tricolours reported unsold flags worth ₹2 crore in 2022, even as cheaper polyester flags entered a newly opened market. Its chairman warned that a sudden shift to machine-made polyester could push traditional production into deeper trouble and leave artisans without work.

The dispute soon acquired a political vocabulary: the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha announced a Dhwaja Satyagraha, backed by the Congress, demanding withdrawal of the amendment. But beneath the argument over nationalism and the provenance of the tricolour was a more immediate question: what happens to a livelihood when the material, method and economics of making the national flag change almost overnight?

Flag economy

The contradiction is now visible in the places where the tricolour is actually made. The Union government’s own data shows that four khadi institutions hold BIS licences to manufacture the IS-I national flag for government and public departments: Karnataka Khadi Gramodyog Samyukta Sangh in Hubballi, Madhya Bharat Khadi Sangh in Gwalior, Khadi Dyers and Printers in Borivali, and Dharwad Taluka Garang Kshetriya Seva Sangh in Karnataka. The Flag Code, however, now permits national flags to be hand-spun and hand-woven or machine-made, using cotton, polyester, wool, silk or khadi bunting.

One of the most important centres in this chain is Bengeri near Hubballi, where the Karnataka Khadi Gramodyog Samyukta Sangha has manufactured BIS-standard flags since receiving certification in 2004. The production process remains labour-intensive: cotton yarn is sourced from khadi centres, spun and woven, dyed in the prescribed colours, cut to specification and stitched, with the Ashoka Chakra positioned precisely at the centre. Around 100 spinners and 100 weavers are associated with the unit, according to recent reporting. Garag, meanwhile, has been a khadi centre since 1954, when freedom fighters established a production unit there.

But the economics surrounding that tradition have changed sharply. The December 2021 amendment opened the flag market to polyester and machine-made fabric, allowing flags to be produced on a scale and at a cost. In Karnataka, KKGSS now says its income has fallen from about Rs.3.5 crore four years ago to Rs.63 lakh, while around 600 weavers in Tulasigeri and Jalihal in Bagalkot district remain engaged in producing the white khadi fabric that eventually reaches Hubballi for conversion into flags.

The effect reaches directly into the value of labour. KKGSS says weavers receive Rs.35.20 per metre, supplemented by a state incentive of Rs.7 per metre. At an average output of 10 metres a day, that amounts to roughly Rs.422 a day—income that, according to the federation, struggles to compete with construction and agricultural work. Women constitute a significant part of this workforce. The federation also says around Rs 1.60 crore in government grants linked to national-flag production remains pending.

The pressure is even sharper in the latest account from Hubballi. KKGSS says it could sell only Rs.88 lakh worth of flags against a Rs.2 crore target this season, attributing the decline to the availability of non-khadi flags. The federation also says pending state incentives for spinners and weavers have reached Rs150 crore. These are claims made by the federation and should be understood as such; they nevertheless illustrate the financial strain being reported by the traditional production network.

There is an irony embedded in the geography of the flag itself. Flags made by women workers at Bengeri are used at Parliament, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Indian embassies and on Indian merchant ships. Yet the workers producing them are confronting shrinking orders, low earnings and delayed incentives.

If khadi once made freedom tangible through employment and self-reliance, what does freedom mean today for the workers whose hands still make the flag?

What happens to the hands behind the Flag?

The flag's journey does not end when it is hoisted. It begins again when the celebrations are over. The 2022 reports documented discarded polyester flags lying on roads and public spaces and raised a more difficult question about their disposal: polyester is non-biodegradable, and the publication cited estimates that its production generates more than twice the carbon dioxide associated with cotton. The Flag Code requires damaged or soiled flags to be disposed of privately and with dignity, traditionally through burning or burial. But a material designed to endure weather and resist degradation creates an obvious contradiction when millions of temporary flags enter the waste stream.

That durability is precisely what polyester manufacturers present as its advantage. Industry representatives argued that polyester was more durable and capable of meeting mass demand, while the government's Har Ghar Tiranga campaign sought to bring the national flag into millions of homes, irrespective of economic status.

But the shift altered more than the material. At Karnataka's Khadi Gramodyog Samyukta Sangh, the workers who once faced overtime during the Independence Day season no longer do so. In 2024, the federation said around 1,200 of Karnataka's approximately 35,000 khadi workers were engaged in national-flag production, 95 per cent of the wider khadi workforce being women. Its secretary said that before polyester entered the market, workers would put in at least two additional hours a day between July and August to meet flag demand; since 2022, there had been no need for such overtime.

The numbers therefore conceal a more intimate disruption. The flag that once generated seasonal work has become less labour-intensive; the fabric that carried a political history has become one material option among several; and the people who produce the khadi version increasingly find themselves competing against a product whose principal advantage is precisely that it can be manufactured faster and more cheaply.

This is where the semiotics of the tricolour meets the political economy. A flag is never merely fabric: societies invest it with memories of sacrifice and belonging. Yet its symbolic power ultimately depends upon a material object—and that object has to be produced by human hands. Gandhi's insistence on khadi during the freedom struggle was significant for precisely this reason. As Tushar Gandhi told Mid-day, khadi was not simply sentiment but a school of economics that provided livelihoods; the pre-Independence flag's association with the charkha similarly connected national identity with cottage-scale production.

The paradox today is sharper. The tricolour may be more widely, while the labour that gives one version of it its historical meaning is becoming increasingly invisible. Once that flag comes down, the contradiction acquires an environmental dimension too: a symbol designed to embody permanence can become synthetic waste.

The question, then, is not whether polyester can make India enough flags. It surely can. The harder questions are who bears the economic cost of that efficiency, what happens to the workers whose livelihoods were tied to khadi, and whether the freedom represented by the tricolour can be separated from the dignity of the hands that make it.