The Beat Report: How we chased rain, courts, and Prada to unpack the Kolhapuri chappal saga

Mint

7 days ago

MUMBAI
:
In "The Beat Report", Mint's journalists bring you unique perspectives on their beats, breaking down new trends and developments, and sharing behind-the-scenes stories from their fieldwork. Subscribe to the newsletter here to get it in your inbox.
It takes anywhere between a few days to several weeks to write one Mint Long Story, sometimes even longer. For each story, we chase sources, meet disparate people, pore over sheets of paper, and often visit faraway places to piece together a story for ourselves.
So, we thought: isn't the telling of a Long Story a story worth telling in itself? What does it take to come up with an idea worthy of 2,000 words that would be worthy of your time and attention? And how do Mint's reporters bring those 2,000 words to life? And so, occasionally in 'The Beat Report", that's what we will do: we'll share with you the backstory behind our stories—sometimes fun, maybe sometimes scary, but hopefully always fascinating.
Here, our reporters will take you on their reporting journey, piecing together what they did behind the scenes resulting in some of our best, most extensive Long Story pieces. With this, we hope to show you the effort we put into writing each of our stories and how exciting (and sometimes strange) reporting from the ground can be!
For this edition, my colleague Devina Sengupta and I take you to the bylanes of Kolhapur and markets of Mumbai as we put together the story of the Kolhapuri chappal.
Read our story here: Prada wore them. Kolhapur made them. Inside India's fight for a lost sole
In July only one sight and sound dominates Maharashtra: rain. Nearly 400 km apart, both of us fought against sheets of rain to get to people and places tied to the story of the Kolhapuri chappal, that 12th-century traditional sandal that hit global headlines earlier this month from the fashion runway of Milan.
Devina spent eight hours driving through Maharashtra's treacherous ghats to reach Kolhapur, the district that is home to the leather Kolhapuri chappals. With a little help from our sources, she had already fixed meetings with artisans and their families who lived in and around Kolhapur city. They were generous, inviting Devina into their homes and shops, offering endless cups of tea in the dreary wet weather, and introducing her to their families, all involved in making and selling the chappals.
Devina even scored two news breaks in this trip: one, that Prada was sending representatives to Kolhapur to meet the artisans (read here), and two, that exporters serving other international brands such as Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch were also looking into buying chappals from the district.
As her conversations veered from business to craft to community, the vibe often got sombre; younger generations shared their frustration of trying to modernise the Kolhapuri chappal trade and their fears for the future. The impact of caste discrimination was unspoken but it lingered, trickling in through moments, such as when a local told Devina that the Creta-owning Kolhapuri chappal businessmen weren't allowed in the village's main temple.
It's common for reporters to keep each other updated as they do field reporting from different places. Devina and I checked in on each other with frequent calls. In this exchange, she was up with notes from her reporting trip well past midnight.
Meanwhile, it was pouring in Mumbai as well and I was fumbling with a little-known app called Vconsol MHC on my phone. In another ten minutes, the two-judge bench presiding over courtroom number 46 were going to listen to a PIL against Prada SpA for allegedly stealing the Kolhapuri chappal. But the court's Zoom link didn't work that day, and this app (suggested by our reporter Priyanka Gawande) was my last hope of not missing the hearing altogether. Thankfully, it worked.
Why not just visit the High Court in person? Most courtrooms don't allow mobile phones or any electronic devices, and taking notes on paper as lawyers and judges go back and forth is nearly impossible unless you've had some courtroom practice.
I had already interviewed Ganesh Hingmire, the advocate who had filed the PIL. In fact, he had introduced Devina to Anurag Kokitkar, one of the Kolhapuri entrepreneurs she writes about in our Long Story. Ganesh ji gave me plenty of reading material, including his original PIL and a working paper that outlined his arguments for how Prada was, in his view, violating the rights of an entire community.
Paperwork is a crucial source of information in stories like these. While the anecdotes and colour from ground reporting give the story soul, we need data and documentation to root it in hard facts. Since most Kolhapuri chappals are sold in 'unorganised' local shops, I wondered how to estimate the size of the trade. Then it struck me: Kolhapuri chappals have their own Harmonised System of Nomenclature (HSN) code for international trade! One look at the Department of Commerce website and I had the numbers to show what we had guessed already: Kolhapuri chappals weren't selling much abroad.
What struck me most in the reporting of this story was that Prada was in the air in Maharashtra as much as the rain. Ironic, considering Prada does not even run a store in the country, unlike many of its luxury peers such as Gucci, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton. The shops in Kolhapur's chappal gully were obviously abuzz with the impact Prada had had. But I think this exchange, in a rain-soaked chappal shop on Linking Road where I was buying a pair, summarised it best:
Vendor: 'I heard this Prada is selling Kolhapuri chappals for ₹2 lakh abroad?"
Me: 'Yes, it's become big news. We are also reporting on it. Also, how much for this pink pair?"
Vendor: '550 rupees. Final price."