By Ramesh Kebbehundi
Tell your friends that you are going to Ballari (Bellary earlier) and they will ask you to bring jeans from there. Apart from the famous and infamous mining industry, Ballari is known for its good-quality, low-cost jeans. Ballari sells jeans brands with names such as ‘Nasty’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Hotline’, ‘Pierre Ballari’, ‘Power’ and ‘Reporter’. The garment industry was introduced to Ballari during the British rule. Ballari was once a British cantonment and it was here that the uniforms for the British troops used to be stitched. Today, this legacy manifests itself in jeans as more than 250 small units in the town churn out around one million pairs of jeans a year.
