Shahi and Good Business Lab worked on a new randomised controlled trial (RCT) where it was observed that correcting the near vision of garment factory workers with glasses improved their productivity by 6 per cent. The RCT was conducted in Shahi’s Karnataka-based factories and provided free glasses to 344 sewing machine operators.
Shahi Exports and Good Business Lab found that providing vision correction glasses to garment workers with presbyopia improved productivity by 6 per cent and delivered a 3x return on investment.
The programme’s success has prompted plans to expand it to 100,000 workers.
The study shows how workforce health investments can strengthen productivity, retention and supply-chain resilience.
Achyuta Adhvaryu, co-founder at Good Business Lab, said in an interview with Fibre2Fashion that there was a 3x return on investment, which was observed as part of the study and the total outlay for the entire program per worker from getting diagnosed to the glasses is about $10 a worker, which is very small.
Adhvaryu said that the 6 per cent productivity gain is kind of realised every day once the vision correction is done. “So, you actually recoup that $10 very quickly. By our estimates, you get the $10 back in less than a month, actually. So, over a quarter, it kind of triples the investment,” he shared.
The trial was conducted on workers who were experiencing Presbyopia, an age-related decline in near vision, affecting their work on the factory floor and their quality of daily life. This condition affects 1 in 4 sewing machine operators in the selected factories, and the trial showed that factories saw a net benefit of ₹4,000 ($43) per worker in just six weeks, with a projected return of ₹15,000 ($162) over a year when there was resolution.
An industry-wide approach
Anant Ahuja, director ESG & Sustainability at Shahi Exports, said in an interview with Fibre2Fashion that Shahi’s perspective on this is very much to find these solutions and have programs that work. “I think we see it as our responsibility to invest in them, and the same is true for a lot of other sustainability solutions…we should invest in these solutions the same way we invest in machinery, in factories, all of that. That is our perspective on it,” Ahuja mentioned.
“I think that if these solutions are driving business outcomes as well as sustainability ones or well-being ones, then I think the firms that do it will grow faster and attract more business. They will succeed more so than the firms that do not,” Ahuja shared.
However, he added that the only challenge would be for brands such as, say, H&M, which has 100s of factories and 100s of companies that it sources from, and it would be difficult to implement these at the brand level.
“I think when solutions are proven like this, the best way, and fastest way, is if suppliers realise, like, hey, I can actually get a huge advantage if I do this, and whatever cost goes into it is, there is a return which you get fairly quickly, so I should scale it up. But at the same time, legislation moves things really quickly,” Ahuja noted.
He cited that all the European legislations and the US Force Labor Prevention Act companies are pretty much changing sourcing strategies overnight. Adhvaryu also acknowledged that there is a role for legislation to play.
“If you have pressure from the government, or from other parts of the world, through buyers, you can actually kind of change things very quickly, because you are kind of pushing those incentives and then there’s also a broad ecosystem from peer pressure…if everybody’s kind of adopting a certain kind of well-being norm and investing in a certain way, then many more are likely to,” Adhvaryu said.
The co-founder of Good Business Lab still noted that this is often an uphill battle as there would be the need for more convincing and ecosystem change that needs to happen. “Because a lot of firms would be like, well, that is Shahi, a big player. Like, of course, they can do that stuff, but we cannot, we do not have the budget, so we do not have the kind of management, time or know-how to pull that kind of thing off,” Adhvaryu mentioned.
Labour is not a cost, but an investment
The study showcased that if this trial were scaled across the estimated 53 million garment workers in India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia, universal vision correction could add tens of billions of dollars in annual output while directly improving workers’ quality of life.
Globally, the study estimates a potential $27 billion annual productivity gain for the textile and garment sector. Ahuja explained that in industries like the garment sector and many others, they look at the labour “purely as a cost,” as opposed to the idea that the workers are an asset that you should invest in and develop.
“You can get your orders from Nike and Gap…but if you don’t have an available workforce that’s present or if there are high absenteeism rates or attrition can really prevent you from delivering on the orders that you do receive,” he shared.
“So, I think in appreciation of the fact that a workforce that’s present, that you can retain and productive, is highly valuable, not just from like a moral point of view, but from like a purely business point of view. So being able to have that sort of shift in thinking is important,” Ahuja concluded.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (AMR)
