Maharashtra Secures 40+ GI Tags To Protect Traditional Crafts Amid Kolhapuri Row With Prada
Kolhapuri Chappals are traditional handcrafted leather sandals that originated from the town of Kolhapur in Maharashtra, India.
Kolhapuri Vs Prada: The row over the alleged imitation of the Kolhapuri chappal design without credit by global luxury fashion brand Prada has brought attention to a larger issue — the unauthorized use of India's traditional crafts, handicrafts, and heritage without any monetary reward or recognition.
In response, and to protect and promote traditional crafts and manufacturing skills of the state, the Maharashtra government has announced that it has secured over 40 Geographical Indication (GI) tags for state-specific products, including Kolhapuri chappals, according to a report by The Indian Express.
Maharashtra Development Commissioner Deependra Singh Kushwah said during an industry-oriented conclave in Mumbai, said Prada is now in trouble as the government has GI tags, including the Kolhapuri Chappal. He further said that good news would come for makers of Kolhapuri Chappal in the coming days and they were working to obtain 30 more GI tags in the coming few months.
GI Tag stands for Geographical Indication Tag. It is a legal label used to identify products that come from a specific location and have unique qualities, reputation, or traditional know-how linked to that place.
What Is The Kolhapuri Chappal and Prada Controversy?
The storm began when a model appeared in the Spring-Summer 2026 menswear collection wearing the luxury footwear resembling to the Kolhapuri Chappal. Netizens condemn the luxury brand for stealing India's heritage without giving credit.
A flurry of posts have surfaced on social media condemning the new showcased footwear of Prada without any credit to the original makers and cultural appropriation.
Following the uproar, Prada openly acknowledged that the inspiration of its new footwear had Indian roots. A Prada spokesperson told BBC that has 'always celebrated craftsmanship, heritage and design traditions", adding that it was 'in contact with the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry & Agriculture on this topic".
A Brief History of Kolhapuri Chappal
The origin of the Kolhapuri Chappal goes back almost 800 years. These are traditional handcrafted leather sandals that originated from the town of Kolhapur in Maharashtra, India.
Kolhapuri Chappals are known for its durability and sturdiness with decorative designs, intricate patterns and regional styles.
They have become India's craftmanship heritage.
The royalty of Kolhapur promoted these chappals in the 13th century, helping them gain popularity across Maharashtra and nearby regions.
In 2019, Kolhapuri chappals were granted a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, recognizing their unique identity and traditional method of production tied to Kolhapur and nearby districts.
About the Author
Business Desk
Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
July 02, 2025, 10:16 IST
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
3 hours ago
- Indian Express
South Korean woman says Gurgaon mall cut utilities at her restaurant; police play mediator
For over a decade, South Korean national Hyeyoung Lee has been running her restaurant, MISO, at Global Foyer Mall on Gurgaon's Golf Course Road. Earlier this week, to her shock, she received a demand notice of Rs 9 lakh from the mall management for damage to the building caused by alleged water leakage from her restaurant. She refused to pay the amount — resulting in the disconnection of her electricity and water supply, police said. On Thursday, Lee lodged a written complaint against the mall management alleging harassment over wrongfully calculated unpaid dues. The firm that runs the mall refuted the claims. In a video posted by the woman on Instagram Friday, she said she's been running her restaurant for 12 years. 'For the last 24 hours, my light and water have been disconnected. I have made so many requests, but no one is listening. I had given a written complaint at Sushant Lok Police Station, but till now no one has come to help me out,' she stated in the video. On Friday, police arranged a meeting between the parties concerned at the Sushant Lok police station to discuss the issue. 'Despite the matter being of a civil nature, Gurugram police facilitated a meeting between the two sides. The dispute over electricity and water was resolved during the meeting. Both parties agreed to hold another meeting on Monday, in the presence of their legal teams, to address the pending Rs 9 lakh dispute,' a Gurgaon Police spokesperson said. The electricity connection was restored (for now) around 12.30 pm Saturday, the woman told The Indian Express. Lee (43), who has been living in Gurgaon since 2011, said she has been facing issues with the mall management since last October, when they allegedly began sending her inflated water bills. 'I've been receiving water bills of Rs 25,000 per month. When my restaurant was on the ground floor, it never exceeded Rs 5,000,' she claimed. She also alleged that the management is harassing her so that she vacates the premises, adding that she has three years left on her current lease. On August 5 (Tuesday), the realty company operating the mall issued a 'final and non-negotiable' notice to the restaurant alleging multiple breaches — that its water leakage caused Rs 9.5 lakh damage to passenger lifts, and Rs 2 lakh damage to the false ceiling, risking collapse. It demanded that the payment be made within 24 hours and threatened disconnection of services, legal action, and eviction if it was not met. Lee refuted the allegations. 'The leak is from one of their pipelines. There are no pending bills, our accountants have tallied and verified multiple times.' The water leak has also destroyed parts of her restaurant, she claimed. Dhirendra Singh, director of Rajdurbar Buildcon Private Limited, which runs the mall through a holding company, told The Indian Express Saturday that the matter has been resolved. He rejected all allegations, particularly of wrongful bills being demanded and plans to evict the restaurant. 'They have accepted their dues amounting to around Rs 12 lakh+GST,' he claimed. 'There are a hundred other shops in the mall, and no one else has ever filed any complaint against us. Why would I create issues towards getting rental income?' he added.
Indian Express
9 hours ago
- Indian Express
Upcoming Jewar airport triggers land rush and with it, a rise in scams
ON DECEMBER 6, 2023, Gaurav Sharma, a 40-year-old resident of Noida's Sector 49, filed a police complaint, alleging that he, along with three of his business associates, had been duped by a group of 15 people who claimed to own a large parcel of agricultural land near the upcoming Noida International Airport in Jewar, Uttar Pradesh. The previous year in January, Gaurav, who runs a consultancy in Noida, and his partners, Gopesh Rohtagi, Yatish Aggarwal and Shilpi Aggarwal, had met Noida-based property dealers Sachin Bhati and Ravinder Sharma, who allegedly told them that 200 hectares of agricultural land near the airport was up for sale. 'Given the proximity to the upcoming airport, we thought it was a good deal since prices were bound to shoot up,' Gaurav said. 'They told us a part of this land belonged to some farmers but that would not be an issue. Between March 2022 and July 2022, they pretended to register around 24 land deals in our names. But in September that year, when we asked them to get our names on the revenue records, they started making excuses. By then, we had already paid them over Rs 24 crore, half of the amount we had fixed. We then decided to see the land and discovered that it never existed,' says Gaurav. The mastermind of the scam, Ravinder Sharma, was arrested by the Central Noida Police on July 20, 2025. Part of the National Capital Region, Jewar, riding on the real estate boom that has accompanied the construction of the new airport, has in the last few years witnessed a spike in land sales – and with it, a rise in cases of real estate fraud. Greater Noida Deputy Commissioner of Police Saad Miya Khan said that in the last two years alone, they had registered at least 20 cases against those involved in fraudulent land deals. 'On an average, there is one FIR registered every month of people being duped in the name of buying property near the airport,' said Khan Police in Gautam Buddha Nagar, of which Jewar is a part, say each of these cases is an elaborate act of fraud involving everything from fake plots to doctored maps and the same plot being sold to multiple people. 'Ravinder Sharma and the others told us they had links with some political families. We believed them. It was so well planned that everything they said appeared to be true. Everything was fake – from registration and bank documents to the 'farmers' and 'lawyers' who they produced before us,' says Gaurav. A string of real estate firms On a recent visit, The Indian Express noticed that the approach to the upcoming Noida International Airport, once an expanse of farmland, is lined with a string of real estate offices, many with prominent, neon-lit sign boards. Inside, most of these are air-conditioned spaces with CCTV cameras, mini-fridges, couches and private cabins for business meetings. Those running the real-estate firms are mostly farmers and gram panchayat members, whose land had been acquired for the airport. At his office in Sabota Mustafabad, around 4 km from the airport, farmer-turned-realtor Satish Kumar, 40, says those duping people are 'outsiders'. 'We have been farmers here, if we commit a fraud, we will be caught. People know us,' he says. He set up his business, Signature Realty, in 2020 with Riyasat Ali, a farmer in Kishorpur village. Ved Prakash Sharma, 58, of Jewar Land Service, which was established in 2017, says property rates in the area have shot up since 2012, around the time land survey for the airport project began in Jewar. 'Those days, 1,000 gaj or square yards cost Rs 4 lakh; that has gone up to Rs 35 lakh now. The price also depends on whether the land is facing the highway, how far it is from the airport or the main road etc. We can show you all kinds of property,' he says. Police say the new airport has had an impact on land prices not just in Jewar and Gautam Buddha Nagar, but in the adjoining districts of Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr and Aligarh, as a result of which the scope of the scam has expanded to these areas too. Central Noida's Deputy Commissioner of Police Shakti Mohan Avasthy said, 'These fraudsters lure victims by creating fake websites and putting up advertisements. This is a problem across districts that touch the boundaries of the airport.' It's a fraud that's riding on the high demand for land in Jewar, where, officials say, circle rates for agricultural land are proposed to go up from the existing Rs 900 per square metre to Rs 1,550 in the next revision — a 70 per cent jump that is a sign of the surging real-estate market in the region. Beyond Jewar On July 19, the Aligarh Police uncovered a land scam worth over Rs 60.89 crore. Their investigation revealed that representatives of Noida-based JSM Pro Infratech Pvt. Ltd had allegedly been posing as real estate developers and duping farmers, small investors, and officials of the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) and the Revenue Department. Talking about the investigation, Aligarh Superintendent of Police (Rural) Amrit Jain said their team posed as prospective land buyers and attended a camp organised by the real-estate firm. 'We learnt that the company organises a camp every weekend. We visited one of these camps and uncovered an elaborate set-up. They would display notified YEIDA plots on a doctored map with a vision of a future township. But these plots did not belong to them,' he says. Jitendra Prasad Singh, a 40-year-old daily wager at a private firm in Noida, was among those who were duped. In May 2022, Jitendra met Kiran, an acquaintance, who informed him about plots being developed by JSM Pro Infratech near Goraula village in Aligarh, 33 km from the Jewar airport. For Jitendra, a migrant from Saran district of Bihar, owning a plot in the NCR seemed like the route to a better future. Singh was introduced to representatives of JSM, who operated out of an office in Noida's Sector 53. After hours of discussion over a map – which police later established was a doctored one – the deal was allegedly settled. 'They showed me a piece of land on the map. It was a 50-square-yard plot marked as D-648, priced at Rs 3.15 lakh. I was a labourer, the money was steep, but to own a plot seemed like a dream come true,' he said. Jitendra transferred Rs 35,000 to the bank account of the company and received a 'booking agreement' on July 15, 2022. 'After paying an additional Rs 6,300 as the first installment, I said I want to see the land I had bought,' he says. When Jitendra went to the site to take possession of his plot, he found out that there was no such plot. 'I saw people working in fields and asked them about the company and whether they owned plots there. I asked them about the company and whether they owned plots here. They said many like me had been turning up and enquiring about plots that didn't exist,' he says. In April, based on Jitendra's complaint, police registered an FIR under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections related to cheating and criminal intimidation, among others. SP Jain said, 'There are at least 25 FIRs against members of this firm. We found that they have been operating since 2020.' On June 16, senior members of the firm – including Ajit Kumar Raman, 45, Shravan Kumar, 47, and Praveen Kumar Patel, 45 –got a stay on their arrest from the Allahabad High Court. The Aligarh Police's probe revealed that members of the real-estate firm also allegedly targeted small farmers and fraudulently carried out land transactions in their names. In September 2021, Jainendra Kumar Laur, a 30-year-old farmer from Aligarh's Goraula village, was watering his millet crop when three men pulled up in a car and told him they were looking to buy a piece of agricultural land. For Jainendra, weighed down by a debt of Rs 20 lakh, the offer felt like an opportunity. 'I had borrowed heavily for the treatment of my father's brain cancer. I lost him in 2019, but the debts kept piling up. So when these people approached me with an offer to buy my land, I agreed,' says Jainendra. 'I agreed to sell just 0.154 hectares, enough to pay off my loans. The sale deed was executed on September 21, 2021, and everything seemed fine. But a year later, a man visited my farm with documents saying that I had sold 1.154 hectares of my land to him. The documents had my forged signature,' he said. Almost four years after the original transaction, on May 5, 2025, Jainendra lodged an FIR with the Aligarh Police. 'A total of 40,596.613 square meters of land in village Goraula, near the Yamuna Expressway, was identified as fraudulently acquired. Following the report's submission, the police attached property worth Rs 60.89 crore,' said SP Jain. Neetika Jha is a Correspondent with The Indian Express. She covers crime, health, environment as well as stories of human interest, in Noida, Ghaziabad and western UP. When not on the field she is probably working on another story idea. On weekends, she loves to read fiction over a cup of coffee. The Thursday Murder club, Yellow Face and Before the Coffee Gets Cold were her recent favourites. She loves her garden as much as she loves her job. She is an alumnus of Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. ... Read More
Mint
21 hours ago
- Mint
India to digitally record tribal heritage to push social, economic inclusion
The Centre is planning to digitally archive Indian tribes' heritage to develop the market for their products and cultural expressions, Vivek Bharadwaj, the secretary of the ministry of panchayati raj, told Mint in an interview. The government has executed a pilot in Jharkhand and will begin documentation in Chhattisgarh in August. The project will be expanded to other states covered under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution, such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan and Telangana—home to approximately 350 recognized scheduled tribes (STs). The idea is to help tribals derive economic value through Geographical Indication (GI) tagging and domestic and global market linkages, Bharadwaj added. A GI tag offers legal safeguards against fake products by protecting the unique identity, quality and reputation of products linked to certain geographical locations. The project will also record their ecological knowledge, crafts, games, festivals, rituals, cuisines, beverages, folk stories, motifs, agricultural practices, institutions, monuments, artefacts, herbal medicines and traditional attire. The government may incorporate this documentation in policymaking, which will help tribals achieve social and economic upliftment, said a volunteer associated with the project, on the condition of anonymity. 'The Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, also known as PESA, empowers the tribal communities to preserve their culture and heritage. Today, this heritage is getting lost due to the winds of change blowing in the tribal areas. It is therefore imperative to facilitate tribal communities to document their culture and traditions," Bharadwaj said. Bharadwaj added that the central government is already conducting a pilot project—since 26 January—in Jharkhand under the Hamari Parampara, Hamari Virasat (our tradition, our heritage) initiative. Cultural preservation The government will begin documentation efforts in Chhattisgarh—home to a rich diversity of tribal communities, many of whom have unique traditions, languages, and lifestyles—in August. Around 30% of the state's total population of 25.5 million, according to the 2011 census, belongs to STs, making it one of the most tribal-dominated states in India. There are around 42 recognized scheduled tribes in the state, broadly categorized into major tribes and minor tribes. The popular tribes are Gond, Baiga, Maria, Halba, Oraon and Munda. With more than 5,000 PESA gram panchayats, Chhattisgarh has great potential to become a role model in documenting and conserving the rich tribal heritage of India, Bharadwaj explained. The government will also develop a state-of-the-art Central Heritage Portal for documentation, archival, and dissemination of tribal cultural data. This would offer a comprehensive database accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public. 'The initiative will go a long way in promoting handicrafts of the tribal community. Currently, we are marketing around half a dozen products of the tribal communities based out of Chhattisgarh through Tribes India retail outlet," said P.M. Khadane, regional manager, Chhattisgarh regional office of Tribal Co-Operative Marketing Development Federation of India Ltd, ministry of tribal affairs. "We feel that many of the products as well as herbal medicines can be patented after the documentation. Also, folk songs can be copyrighted to help communities derive economic and cultural benefits," said Vijay Kuzur, a social activist and associated with the Hamari Parampara, Hamari Virasat programme in Jharkhand. Additionally, documentation helps in mapping the area, so in case of any displacement, the tribes would be entitled to appropriate compensation. The effort assumes significance as India has either lost or is on the verge of losing many tribes and tribal languages to modernization, according to experts. "For example, Ghotul practice—a cultural academy where tribal youth are shaped into custodians of their heritage, trained in values, arts, and communal life under the guidance of elders—prevalent among Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh's Gond and Muria communities doesn't exist anymore," said Delhi University professor Jitendra Meena who authored the book Rashtra Nirman Mein Aadiwasi (Tribes in Nation-Building).
