The Village Workshop That Sews India's Flags
In Bengeri, near Hubballi in Karnataka, a khadi unit has been making National Flags since 1957 — hand-spun, hand-woven, and inspected against a standard that allows no near-enough.
The flag that flies over Parliament, over district headquarters and over thousands of schools has to be made somewhere. A great many of them are made in a modest set of workshops in Bengeri, a locality near Hubballi in Karnataka.
The Karnataka Khadi Gramodyoga Samyukta Sangha has been producing National Flags there since 1957, and for years it was widely described as the only unit in the country certified to do so. Its workforce is predominantly women, many of whom have worked there for decades.
Making a flag to the National Flag standard is unforgiving work. The cloth begins as cotton spun by hand and woven by hand into khadi bunting. The thread count is specified. The dye shades of saffron and green are specified. The proportions of the flag are specified. So is the diameter of the Ashoka Chakra and the spacing of its twenty-four spokes.
At each stage the material is tested and inspected, and the Bureau of Indian Standards certification means those checks are not a matter of in-house judgement. A flag that fails at any stage does not get sold at a discount or quietly passed along. It does not leave as a National Flag at all.
The people doing this work are keenly aware of where the results go. A flag that leaves that workshop may end up at a border post, at a school assembly, or draped over the coffin of someone's child. That knowledge shows up in the pace of the work — slower than it needs to be, deliberately.
The 2021 amendment to the Flag Code, which permitted machine-made and polyester flags alongside khadi, changed the economics of this considerably, and khadi units have said so publicly. It is a genuine tension: wider availability of the flag on one side, and the livelihood of hand-spinning communities on the other.
Whatever the material, the point stands. Somebody made your flag. Somebody measured the chakra and counted the spokes. Knowing that makes it much harder to leave one crumpled in a drawer, or to put one out with the household waste when it wears out.