“Justice for Jeyasre: how a brutal murder led to a better deal for garment workers in India,” 14 January 2026

…On 5 January 2021 the decomposing body of Jeyasre Kathiravel, a 21-year-old Dalit woman who was an employee of Natchi, then an H&M Group supplier, was found on a strip of farmland a few miles from her village after she failed to return home following a shift on New Year’s Day.

A man named V Thangadurai, her supervisor, was arrested and put in police custody, where he confessed to Kathiravel’s rape and murder.

…

…It took a year-long “Justice for Jeyasre” campaign, plus an investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium, which corroborated the women’s allegations, before the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU) – an independent, female-led and majority-Dalit union that represented many Natchi employees – sat down with Eastman to sign what would become known as the Dindigul Agreement to End Gender-Based Violence and Harassment.

…

The binding contract borrowed lessons from a similar accord signed in Lesotho a few years earlier. But the Dindigul agreement was different, says Nandita Shivakumar, who served as the campaigns coordinator for Afwa at the time, because it had the strong presence of a local union.

H&M Group, despite no longer buying garments from Natchi, also signed a supporting agreement with TTCU, Afwa and GLJ, providing support and funding for the changes that had to be made. Later, Gap Inc and the owner of Calvin Klein, PVH Corp, did the same, despite having never sourced from Natchi, though both had contracted with other Eastman factories in the past.

Together, they provided US$300,000 (£223,000) for the duration of the Dindigul agreement, which concluded in October after a seven-month extension from the original March 2025 end date.

..

A spokesperson for H&M said it remained in talks with labour organisations and continued to work on the prevention of gender-based violence and harassment in its supply chain in India and globally.

But there is disappointment that other brands did not sign the Dindigul agreement. Neither have they come hammering on Natchi’s doors with a slew of orders, despite what Sarosh Kuruvilla, a professor at Cornell University’s ILR School who has studied the Dindigul agreement at length, describes as “overwhelming evidence” that the deal was meeting the goals for which it was created.

…

When the last large shipments to H&M Group were dispatched in June 2021, employment at Natchi fell by half to just under 1,700 workers, according to Kuruvilla’s report. In April 2025, Natchi employed more than 1,800 workers, or 55% of its workforce in January 2021.

Despite buy-ins from brands such as Walmart and Zara’s owner, Inditex, Kuruvilla says the factory has been unable to replace H&M Group with a similar “high-volume, high-value” buyer, which has made weathering the global economic slowdown more challenging.

..

The bad press that followed Kathiravel’s murder, and which continues to dominate online searches for the factory, could be another factor, he adds, as well as the eye-watering 50% so-called reciprocal tariff that the United States has imposed on India.

But Kuruvilla thinks there is another reason some brands are unwilling to go into business with the factory.

“There are lots of brands that will not source from a factory where there’s a collective bargaining agreement or a labour management agreement because they think that’s not a good thing [for business],” he says. “Somebody will say: ‘Oh, they can go on strike any time.’”

…

Shivakumar doesn’t think the industry cares. “I think the CSDDD [the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive] was a way forward to some degree, but now it’s been watered down.”