Achieving sustainability in the indian leather industry: issues and challenges

The Indian Leather industry has been facing serious threat from various sources starting from stringent environment regulations, banning of several chemicals which serve as key inputs in the leather processing to escalating costs due to testing and certification requirements. Compliance to environmental standards is adding to real economic costs for the firms in the sector. According to Exim Bank Research Brief (2006) on the Indian Leather Industry, the sector consisted of around 42000 SSI units accounting for over 75% of total production and employing around 2.5 million people. This portrays the importance of the sector in providing livelihood to a significant chunk of the working class people. Also achieving compliance sometimes become difficult for many of the SSI's due to cost constraints. The question of sustainability has become a necessary evil nowadays for all related industries. Sustainability calls for meeting the needs of the present generation simultaneously conserving for the future. There are three pillars of sustainable development as per established literary sources viz. environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and social sustainability. Achieving sustainability in the above three paradigms along with meeting the numerous challenges posed by several sources is really a tough goal for the Indian Leather industry. So considering the criticality of the situation an effort has been made to investigate the several issues and challenges faced by the aforesaid sector and simultaneously how it can achieve sustainability at various levels have been discussed.