Doing things differently means sometimes you have to rip up everything and start again. The last harvest season presented new challenges, not least because we had a bumper crop of cotton, bringing our harvest to 120 tonnes between Summer & Winter. With a harvest so much larger than anticipated, we were challenged to grow our workforce quickly, in order to pick and process the cotton. 

In just a year we have grown from a team of 60 cotton pickers to 154. Every morning at 7am we collect workers from ten villages, taking them to the cotton fields all within a distance of 50km. At the end of the day, everyone is picked up at 4pm and taken back to their villages. We have very tight quality control to ensure that the cotton is weighed correctly and the purity of our own cotton seeds, grown only using our natural fertilisers and in strict rotation with other crops to make sure the soil health is maintained. It’s become quite an operation.

The bountiful harvest is welcome but we hadn’t expected to employ quite so many workers in the fields. One thing we hadn’t quite thought through was how to pay so many people, particularly tribal people from small villages who are used to being paid casually in cash, with little oversight or transparency. Consequently, they don’t have bank accounts; they are used to living hand to mouth so any money that comes in feeds the family that day.

It’s important to make sure that when we pay our workers, the money they are owed goes directly to the worker and doesn’t end up in other people’s pockets. For us, the surest way of knowing that is by paying directly into a bank account. It means everything is transparent and every transaction is tracked and traceable. So for a period of time this harvest, we sent our entire accounts team out to the villages to open bank accounts for the workers, or to ensure that a family member could access the account. Each village has an Oshadi representative we have selected to represent us so some of the payments are made to their bank account and they can distribute it to the workers in the village. These are trusted people within the villages, they are called scientists because they have the local farming knowledge and know-how.

We set up over one hundred bank accounts, working directly with the banks so we can set up the biometrics needed in situ in the villages. Nobody has ever done anything like this before and it means that the village people can now start to save and budget and have control over their own finances. It has taken a lot of time and effort, but it means that we know people are being paid on time and fairly.

Changing the system takes time and throws up unexpected challenges. We feel very proud that we are working to overcome some of the barriers that have stopped rural people from being treated fairly and equally. There’s a reason many factories set up in rural areas - there is plenty of cheap labour and no regulations in terms of pay or working conditions.

At Oshadi we are committed to treating our workers fairly. Beyond opening accounts for the temporary workers who support our harvest, our full time employees earn above the living wage (₹14,625 in rural Tamil Nadu, according to the Global Living Wage Coalition). At Oshadi, the average monthly wage among our farm employees is ₹16,673 and among our office and production facilities, it's ₹28,090. Our paid apprentices can access full time employment with us within 3 months. 

Below, you can scroll through the wages of every single person on our payroll. It’s not the most exciting table to read row by row, but it’s an important step towards transparency in an industry that relies on wage opacity.

FULL TIME EMPLOYEES WAGES, 2024