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livemint.com / 2 weeks ago
livemint.com / 1 month ago
I tried Prada's Kolhapur chappals
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.About a decade ago, when I told one of my aunts about my first job at a news agency, she said, “You will become jhola-chappal wali now”. Jhola meant cloth bag, and chappal, Kolhapuris, the clichéd Indian journalist’s uniform. I did become that person, quite proudly.
As the years progressed and salary increased, bags became leather, but Kolhapuris remained a constant. They still are—for being affordable, unfussy and reliably good-looking. More importantly, they have outlasted every passing spring-summer footwear trend.Breaking in a new pair each time, however, demands patience—just the leather around the toe loop takes about a week to soften.That wasn’t the case when I slipped into Prada’s newly launched limited-edition sandals “inspired by the Kolhapuri chappals”, earlier this week.
The pair is the Italian fashion house’s response after being caught flat-footed last June, when it sent models down a Milan runway in T-strap sandals that Indian social media was quick to note looked strikingly similar to the handcrafted footwear long associated with Kolhapur, Maharashtra. What followed was swift: accusations of design theft, questions of cultural appropriation, and calls for acknowledgement and credit. Towards the end of 2025, Prada signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the leather development corporations of Karnataka and Maharashtra–Dr.
Babu Jagjivan Ram Leather Industries Development Corporation Limited (LIDKAR) and Sant Rohidas Leather Industries & Charmakar Development Corporation limited (LIDCOM), respectively. Both LIDKAR and LIDCOM hold the ownership of the Geographical Indication (GI) tag for Kolhapuri chappals. The plan: to produce around 2,000 pairs in India by Prada
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21.05 / 10:17
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21.05 / 10:17
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markets
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21.05 / 09:47
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FPIs exit Korea & Taiwan: Is India ready for the flow rotation?
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21.05 / 08:45
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Secured credit cards: Unlocking credit and building a credit score for millions
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Forensic audits support corporate-fraud probes and IBC cases but still lack enforceable standards
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UPS
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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.MUMBAI: India’s listed electronics manufacturers are under pressure to defend profitability as the mobile-phone assembly boom slows, prompting a shift towards higher-value industrial electronics.Investors remained jittery through the last fiscal, driven by concerns that slowing consumer sentiment could weigh on the rapid growth that electronics manufacturing services (EMS) firms have delivered so far.In an interview with Mint, Jasbir Singh Gujral, managing director of Syrma SGS Technology Ltd, India’s second-largest listed EMS firm, said, “We’re increasingly looking to capture a larger chunk of contracts from defence, aerospace and med-tech verticals, all of which represent opportunities for original design manufacturing, and also bring significantly higher margins. We’ve already started this transition, and we plan to do more of it this fiscal.”Beyond mobile phones and laptops, EMS firms are expanding into smart metres for electricity boards, aerospace and defence subsystems, railway safety instrumentation, printed circuit boards and display assemblies, and medical devices deployed in hospitals.India’s annual mobile phone shipments have remained subdued since the covid-19 pandemic, with industry estimates pointing to a single-digit decline this calendar year from 152 million smartphones shipped last year.The margin pressure driving this shift is increasingly visible.In FY26, Syrma SGS reported an operating margin of 7.1%, up 2.3 percentage points.
