What GI Certification Really Does, and Doesn't Do, for Women Artisans

When you see a Geographical Indication tag on a piece of Chikankari or Kantha, what do you assume it is telling you? Most buyers assume it means the artisan behind it, quite possibly a woman, is recognised and paid fairly for her work. That assumption is worth examining, because a GI tag does not actually promise any of that.

Understanding what it does promise, and what it leaves open, changes how you should read that tag, and what it can honestly tell you about the woman who made the piece in your hands.

What a GI Tag Tells You

A Geographical Indication is a form of intellectual property, and India currently has 318 handicraft GIs registered under this system. Each one confirms that a product, Pochampally Ikat or Banaras brocade, for instance, originates from a specific region and follows a method traditionally associated with that place.

That is what the tag guarantees: origin and authenticity. It says nothing about who made your particular piece, how she was paid, or whether she has any legal claim to the income her craft generates. The protection sits with the craft's reputation, not with the person who makes it.

Who Is Behind the Numbers

To see why that distinction lands differently for women, it helps to look at who is doing this work in the first place. An estimated 64.66 lakh artisans work in India's handicraft industry, and 64% of them are women. Narrow that to handloom weaving specifically and the share climbs to 71%.

The Fourth All India Handloom Census puts women's overall share of the handloom workforce at 72%, with close to 89% of weaver households based in rural India.

Hold that alongside the earlier point and it sharpens considerably. Whatever a GI tag protects, or fails to protect, it is overwhelmingly women's labour on the line.

Why the Money Does Not Automatically Reach Her

A GI tag can raise prices for a craft cluster by 20 to 30%, and it is tempting to assume that premium lands with the person who made the piece. In most craft supply chains, it does not reach her directly.

Payment typically moves through several intermediaries, a master weaver who distributes the orders, an exporter who handles sales abroad, a middleman negotiating somewhere in between, before any of it reaches the artisan herself.

Because women are more likely to work as home-based or piece-rate labour rather than as registered producers, they tend to sit furthest from the point in that chain where the money actually starts moving.

This is worth knowing because it changes what a fair price should be judged by. Not what the craft sells for in a shop or online, but what portion of that actually lands with the woman who made it.

Why Ownership Is a Different Question From Skill

Skill and legal ownership of a craft are two separate things, and GI registration follows the second, not the first. Registering a craft under a GI usually requires a formal producer group, which depends on land records, bank accounts and existing cooperative membership, things that have historically been easier for men to access across rural India.

A woman can be the most skilled hand in a workshop and still have no formal say in how the craft she practises is registered, licensed or represented.

This is worth holding onto if you care about fixing the money question above, because paying artisans fairly and giving them a legal stake in their own craft are two separate issues. Solving one does not automatically solve the other.

What This Means for How You Read a GI Tag

This does not make a GI tag meaningless, and buying GI-tagged craft is not a wasted gesture. It means the tag by itself is not enough information to know whether your purchase reached the woman who made it.

If that is what you actually want to know, look past the tag and ask the seller three things:

• Whether the individual artisan is named
• Whether payment can be traced back to a person rather than a cluster
• Whether the certifying body includes women as members with a stake in it, not only as labour within it.

Those three answers tell you more about real impact than the GI tag does on its own.

Naming the Maker Is Non-Negotiable

This is the standard we hold ourselves to. Every artisan we work with is named, not folded into a cluster or a district. We trace individual pieces back to the person who made them, and wherever a craft allows it, we work with cooperatives actually led by the women doing the work, not simply staffed by them.

A GI tag can tell you where a craft is from. It cannot tell you whether the woman who made your piece was paid fairly or credited by name. Until that changes at scale, it is a question worth asking every time you buy a piece of Indian craft.