Digital Product Passports: Enabling Transparent Textile Supply Chains in India

The global order today is increasingly complex, with frequent disruptions to global supply chains. At the same time, rising emphasis on climate action, sustainability, and the circular economy has made transparency across supply chains more important than ever. The textile supply chain in India today largely functions as a ‘black box’, where data on materials is either heavily dispersed, opaque, or undigitised.

In response, digital product passports (DPPs) are rapidly emerging as trade requirements, driven by regulatory developments such as the European Union’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, which mandates product level information disclosure. For major textileexporting countries like India, the resultant compliance requirements for DPPs necessitate supply-chain-level preparedness to ensure competitiveness. If implemented strategically, this can also strengthen sustainability and resilience at the domestic level.

This paper analyses how DPPs can function as a critical enabler and common digital backbone that can help bring transparency in India, particularly in fragmented sectors such as textiles. A DPP stores comprehensive data on product composition, origin, environmental impact, and end-of-life handling, covering the entire lifecycle of a product. The defining feature of DPPs is product-based digitisation of information that is independent of the company, its size, or revenue. This minimises the scope for conflation of product level environmental performance with broader corporate greening claims and enables supplychain substitutability towards lower-footprint inputs and processes.

The paper further explores the role of DPPs in addressing critical data gaps that impede effective implementation of the extended producer responsibility framework by facilitating transparency for producers, consumers, regulators, and recyclers.

Using a systems approach, the paper carries out a readiness assessment for adopting DPPs as a policy instrument in India, including elements of comparative policy analysis, stakeholder mapping, and risk analysis. The paper ultimately proposes a roadmap for systemic DPP adoption in India—a sequenced pathway in which governance preconditions are identified for scaled implementation.

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