What The Market Thinks About Baba Ramdev's New Product- Jeans

- Sruti Agarwal

These days, when it is fashionable to wear your nationalism on your sleeve, the newest accessory of swadeshi sentiment is evidently also another wearable commodity. And it comes in ‘satvik’ colours, in designs that are tailored to protect the modesty of its wearers, unlike those skin-tight Western apparel that are calculated to inflame the worst passion of our desi boys. Soon at a store near you: Baba Ramdev certified, Patanjali Jeans.

After threatening FMCG giants like Hindustan Lever, ITC and Nestle with homegrown noodles, biscuits, juices, spices, cereals and a hundred other consumables, Ramdev’s business empire is readying to take on Levi’s and Lee with a new line of fashion wear with a decidedly homegrown twist. “The line of jeans is our effort to reclaim the Rs 2 lakh-crore that is spent in the jeans industry across the globe, 90 per cent of which is made in India,” says Baba Ramdev’s spokesperson, S.K. Tijarawala. According to a report by Teknopak, which monitors many industries, including denims, the Indian market for the cloth is pegged at nearly Rs 18,000 crore, of which only 25 per cent is accounted for by local jeans brands. “We are all swadeshi jeans brands,” says Kavindra Mishra, CEO, Pepe Jeans. “All our raw material is from the country, the labour is local, and production in-house too,” he adds. India makes one billion metres of denim each year, and almost all Indian jeans companies can lay claim to the ‘swadeshi’ tag with equal, or more, legitimacy.