Sustainability practices and their impact on profitability in textile MSMEs in Panipat District of Haryana

The major factor driving competitiveness and resilience in the manufacturing sector across the globe is to ensure sustainability. The SMEs, although constitute a major economic pillar of most of the countries, are not free from considerable pressure to undertake environmental responsibilities along with meeting their economic performance. The present work explores textile MSMEs in the handloom city Panipat, Haryana, yearning to understand the role of investments in green technology, awareness levels about circular economy, and usage of renewable energy to enhance profit margins and reduce production costs. The results of this study indicate that the investors resorting to green tech have managed to achieve high profit margins, reaching almost double those having no or low investments in green technology. Higher circular economy consciousness levels have been observed among recycling units, when comparing the studied industrial set ups. As expected, enterprises who adopted renewable energy could significantly decrease production costs. The insights obtained from our work clearly indicate that adopting sustainable practices brings out significant economic advantages in the industrial clusters. The study is concluded by providing some recommendations to the major stakeholders, i.e. industry associations as well as policymakers. We have given suitable evidence to indicate that integrating green technology, considering capacity building and providing more supportive finance mechanisms may provide boost to MSME ecosystem.