The Ministry of Textiles is in the final stages of drafting a national garment sizing standard, one that will still use the familiar S/M/L labels, but redefine what those letters actually mean for Indian bodies.
For years, most Indian apparel brands have simply borrowed sizing charts from the US or UK, even though Indian body proportions don’t map neatly onto Western measurements.
Layer on top of that is the fact that every brand and retailer runs its own internal sizing logic, and shoppers are left with a particular size that fits perfectly of one brand but is oversize for another brand.
NIFT ran a nationwide anthropometric survey covering upward of 25,000 Indian men and women aged 15 and older, capturing real-world measurements across shoulder width, waist size, and other fit-critical dimensions. This dataset is now the backbone of the proposed standard.
“A joint task force pulling together textiles ministry officials, apparel manufacturers, and retail industry representatives is currently hashing out those specifics before the standard gets formal notification,” The Economic Times reported.
This sits inside a wider government push to standardize India’s textile and apparel industry — an effort aimed at giving both consumers and manufacturers a common, India-specific reference point instead of imported sizing logic that was never built for the Indian market.
Image courtesy: Senivpetro on Freepik
