Bridging livelihoods and sustainability in India’s handloom sector: linking income precarity, green adoption, and market integration

The handloom sector in India underpins low-carbon textile production, traditional heritage, and rural employment but continues to suffer from income precarity, a lack of inclusive participation in environmentally friendly inputs, and poor access to non-local markets. Evidence of the empirical relationship between these dimensions is relatively scarce. Drawing on the geo-aggregated administrative dataset from NITI Aayog, this study examines how local income composition is associated with three ‘sustainability margins’ in the handloom economy: (i) cooperative participation (inclusive livelihoods), (ii) natural dye adoption (environmental upgrading), and (iii) non-local sales transaction share by export and e-commerce (market integration). The raw data consists of 64 rural/urban geography-segments with 32 parent geographies. Household-rate models A and B use 63 valid observations and sales-transaction model C uses 61. The main estimates are based on denominator-weighted quasibinomial logit with CR2 standard error clustering by parent geography and Satterthwaite small-sample adjustment. Predicted outcomes and leave-one-segment-out and leave-one-parent-geography-out diagnostics assess substantive magnitude and directional stability. Household-weighted income composition was 67.08% below ₹5,000 per month, 26.20% at ₹5,001–10,000 and 6.72% above ₹10,000. Cooperative participation increased with the share of <₹5,000 (OR per 10% point reallocation = 2.16, 95% CI 1.01–4.63, p = 0.049), but no sign reversal was observed for influence analyses. Natural-dye adoption showed a negative but statistically imprecise association (OR = 0.61, 95% CI 0.24–1.57; p = 0.222), and the expected adoption declined from 68.7% in Q25 to 26.2% in Q75 for the low-income share. Non-local transaction shares remained very small (predicted 0.24%–0.98% for Q25–Q75). Although the full-sample Model C coefficient was positive, the sign reversed for some influence exclusions, indicating limited directional robustness. Income precarity is associated differently with organisational participation, ecological upgrading and market integration. The findings are consistent with cooperative risk-sharing and financial constraints on ecological upgrading, but the cross-sectional aggregate design does not establish these mechanisms. Therefore, meso-level conditions, such as finance, certification, design support, logistics and digital market infrastructure should be treated as hypotheses for direct testing rather than as measured determinants.