Many adolescents and young adults who attend government training centres go on to run their own weaving businesses, while weavers say it takes a year to become fully proficient, whether one starts as an adult or a child. Enterprises often small and impoverished The workforce of the hand-knotted carpet industry is mired in poverty. Most weaving enterprises in the Indian handknotted carpet industry are small, marginal operations run by poor and illiterate men, the report states, and they have no margin to pay higher wages. An enterprise normally consists of a loom set up in a family's one-room cottage, with perhaps an additional loom, or looms, in an attached veranda or a shed. Male family members, including children, provide the bulk of the labour.
Women are almost completely absent from the carpet-weaving industry in north India.
This is not the case in other countries or other parts of India. India's Factories Act has influenced the current structure of the carpet industry, the study finds. Costly health, safety and labour regulations to which large firms are subject do not apply to cottage industries. The extra labour costs involved in eliminating child labour become much easier to absorb further down the distribution chain. With sales or value-added tax, the carpets can easily cost four times as much to the consumer as the Indian export price, Richard Anker, one of the study's authors, explains.