Apparel Labelling in India: What the Tag Must Carry

A garment sold online in India carries two separate labelling duties from two different places. Most brands know the first exists and assume it is the whole job.

The first is the general pre-packaged commodity layer: maximum retail price, net quantity, manufacturer or packer or importer details, country of origin, consumer care. It applies to a garment because it applies to nearly everything sold pre-packed, and we have covered it in full in legal metrology labelling for e-commerce. This post covers the layer that sits on top.

Two layers, two rule families

The general layer comes from the Legal Metrology (Packaged Commodities) Rules, 2011, on the consumer affairs side of government. One garment-specific detail is worth knowing. In the consolidated Rules published by the Department of Consumer Affairs, ready-made garments appear in the Fourth Schedule, read with Rule 12(2), which lists commodities that may be sold by weight, measure or number. Garments are listed against number, so net quantity is a count and not a weight.

The second layer is textile-specific. Fibre composition, care instructions and size marking are textile questions, and textile labelling sits with the Textiles Committee, the statutory body under the Ministry of Textiles. The power it uses is Section 23 of the Textiles Committee Act, 1963 (41 of 1963). That is not an inference, it is the opening line of the labelling regulations the Ministry of Textiles publishes, including the draft Handloom Mark Standards (Labelling and Display) Regulations, 2025 carried on its own website. The two families have different inspectors and different notification channels, so a brand watching only the consumer affairs feed will miss the textile ones.

What the textile layer asks for

In substance, four things.

• Fibre composition. What the garment is made of, stated as percentages rather than as a mood. Cotton rich is not a composition.
• Care instructions. Washing, bleaching, drying and ironing guidance, conventionally carried in India as the care symbols maintained by the Bureau of Indian Standards rather than as free text.
• Size marking. The size, stated on the garment, matching the size the buyer selected.
• Country of origin, and the entity that stands behind the product.

We are deliberately not quoting regulation or standard numbers here. The Textiles Committee has been moving the apparel and made-up requirements onto a formal footing, and when we checked in September 2026 the draft it published was no longer at the address it was published at. That tells you how live this is. Before committing a label run, get the current text from the Textiles Committee and the current standard from the Bureau of Indian Standards. Plenty of tags in the market are wrong, so copying one is not research.

This is operational guidance, not legal advice. Where the answer costs you a production run, take it to someone qualified to give it.

Why the marketplace checks this before any regulator does

Sellers usually meet these requirements for the first time as a blocked catalogue upload, not as a notice. The reason sits in the rules. The Packaged Commodities Rules place a duty on an e-commerce entity, at Rule 6(10), to display the mandatory declarations on the digital network used for the transaction, with the month and year of packing excepted. The same sub-rule then says that in a marketplace model, responsibility for the correctness of those declarations lies with the manufacturer or seller or dealer or importer.

Read those together from a platform’s side and the behaviour is obvious. The platform must make sure a declaration appears. It is not on the hook for whether it is true. So the cheapest compliance is a mandatory attribute that refuses to save when empty, enforced by software with nobody in the loop. That is why a missing fibre composition field kills a listing at eleven at night and no one answers your email. It is not a curation judgement, it is a liability boundary. Catalogue standards in fashion are strict for adjacent reasons, covered in catalogue standards for fashion brands.

The label and the listing have to say the same thing

Treat the sewn-in tag, the listing attribute and the invoice as three copies of one fact that must never diverge. The buyer sees at least two, and a consumer complaint usually starts as a mismatch rather than a defect.

The sharpest version is a regulated word in your listing title. Handloom is the clearest example. The draft Handloom Mark regulations on the Ministry of Textiles site require that every product marketed, sold or promoted as handloom carries a valid Handloom Mark Label, and separately prohibit advertising any product as handloom unless it is duly certified and labelled. The same draft defines publicity to include advertisement in digital media. Your product title is publicity. So is your filter tag.

The same logic applies to any claim your tag cannot prove. Pure cotton, organic, silk, merino. If the word is on the listing, the evidence has to exist for the lot you shipped. Tying that evidence to a consignment is part of the same document discipline as your platform paperwork, set out in the marketplace document checklist.

The failure that catches good brands: the mill changes

Here is how it happens, nearly always mid-season. A fabric supplier cannot deliver. Sourcing finds a substitute at the same hand feel and a workable price. The costing sheet is updated because finance insists, and the garment goes into production. The label artwork, approved months earlier, is not touched, because nobody in that chain owns it. The listing attribute is certainly not touched; it was filled in once at onboarding. The tag now states a composition the garment does not have, and the listing repeats it faithfully.

Three controls fix this permanently, and none are expensive.

• Composition is owned by whoever signs off the fabric, not by whoever orders labels. One source of truth, and the artwork is generated from it rather than typed.
• A change of mill, composition, factory or origin is a hard trigger. It forces a label re-approval and a listing attribute update before the production order releases.
• Old label stock outlives old fabric. Count it, reconcile against the run, and scrap the remainder rather than letting a storeman use it up.

Then check on a cadence, because processes drift. A quarterly sweep comparing tag, listing attribute and test report across a sample of live styles is cheap, and it belongs in the same rhythm as your catalogue audit. The label is the only part of your product that makes a promise in writing. Worth knowing it is still true.