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Why India’s struggling wool economy offers a cautionary tale for policy makers
India's wool economy is a reminder that trade policy is rarely linear.
In the late 1980s, India had one of the world's largest populations of sheep and a wool economy valued at an estimated Rs 4,500 crore at today's prices. Wool sustained an entire ecosystem of shepherds, spinners, sorters, dyers and weavers.
This landscape changed abruptly in 1991, when India's structural adjustment policies slashed tariffs and dismantled decades of protectionism. The changes opened the country to global trade. While this fuelled a boom in sectors such as software, Indian wool was devastated as imports flooded in.
Three decades later, a new twist has emerged. The global economy, taking its cues from US President Donald Trump, has shifted back toward protectionism.
The few Indian producers who had carved out export niches, especially those working with high-quality fleece, now find themselves squeezed out of their most lucrative market. In a striking echo of the 1990s, the same industry that was undercut by the removal of tariffs three decades ago is now threatened by their re-imposition abroad.
What remains constant is the pastoralist origin of the fibre: the households that continue to rear sheep, even as the wool they shear each year often has no buyers. Whether tariffs fall or rise, the first impact of policy lands on these households.
When India restructured its economy in the 1990s, among the sectors that benefitted enormously was the country's software industry: tech firms accessed imported hardware more easily, the devalued rupee attracted global clients and exports soared to over $12 billion in 2004 from $128 million in 1990-'91.
However, the same policies dealt a devastating blow to the wool sector.
Most of the country's wool was coarse, suited for carpets and blankets rather than fine apparel. But it was a coherent economy, built on breeds adapted to dry landscapes and a network of small users who depended on steady access to local fibre.
For India's pastoralists, wool provided a predictable annual cash flow – even though a larger share of income came from meat and the sales of live animals
Before liberalisation, Indian mills had already preferred imported fine wool but high duties – often 45% – kept domestic fleece competitive. Once tariffs dropped to as low as 4%, cheaper and better quality imports flooded the market.
It wasn't just imports that changed demand. Synthetic fibres, also newly affordable, spread quickly. Domestic users shifted almost overnight to imported alternatives.
Rajasthan's carpet industry, for instance, began importing entire containers of finer, cleaner fleece from Australia instead.
In 1991, Indian wool produced was valued at Rs 4,000 crore at today's prices. By 2001, it had fallen to Rs 2,800 crore.
For Indian shepherds and small artisans, the impact was swift. The price of Indian wool, which was Rs 300 per kg (at today's prices) in the early 1990s, began to plunge, stagnating at around Rs 40 per kg from 1995.
Today, this price remains at Rs 45 per kg-Rs 50 per kg, so low that herders in Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Rajasthan often make a loss on every sheep sheared. Many have stopped transporting wool to markets altogether – it is burned, buried, or left to rot because disposal is cheaper than selling it.
The wool produced in India today is valued at close to Rs 600 crore.
The paradox of liberalisation was stark: a policy meant to make India globally competitive ended up crippling one of its oldest and most geographically widespread rural industries.
In 2025, the new era of global protectionism has been prompted by the policies of Trump in the US – India's largest market for textiles and apparel. New duties introduced last year have raised effective tariffs on some Indian goods to 50%-60%.
For woollen garments and niche exports such as fine organic wool, the rates are high enough to knock Indian producers out of the US market entirely. Competitors like Australia and New Zealand face lower duties, giving them a pricing edge.
Meanwhile, India's own policies remain uneven. The government has recently reintroduced protections for synthetic fabrics, imposing a minimum import price to deter cheap polyester. But raw wool imports continue to enter at a duty of just 4%, preserving a long-standing tilt in favour of man-made fibres.
This imbalance amplifies the structural disadvantage created in the 1990s, making it even harder for domestic wool to regain viability.
Lost in policy swings, first toward openness, then toward protectionism, is the simple fact that wool production begins far from ports and mills. It begins with pastoralists moving flocks across drylands, shearing animals adapted over generations to local climates.
For them, though wool was never the main source of income, it was an essential seasonal cash payment that helped sustain their households.
When tariffs fell in the 1990s, the first people to feel the collapse were not mill owners but shepherds walking down from summer pastures to find that nobody wanted their fibre. When tariffs rise in the US today, the immediate effect is absorbed by the handful of herders and processors who built a small but promising export channel, one suddenly rendered unviable.
India has now experienced both extremes: the harm of removing protections too quickly and the harm of facing protectionism elsewhere. The victims, in both cases, are rural producers who operate on thin margins and have little bargaining power in distant markets.
As India debates the future of its textile sector, 2026 is in sharp focus, since it is the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralism. The story of pastoralist wool offers a cautionary tale. Policies designed for one part of the economy can reshape another in ways that are neither intended nor easily reversible.
The challenge now for India is to rebuild and strengthen a domestic system that values natural fibre and the people who produce it, before another generation of shepherds finds wool too burdensome to carry at all.
Aniruddh Sheth is the research coordinator at the Centre for Pastoralism, New Delhi. Data on the wool economy is based on research being conducted at the institution.
Source: Scroll
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