Bharat Tex 2026, New Delhi: dates, venue, highlights and event guide
Bharat Tex 2026 brought together India's textile and apparel ecosystem at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, from 14 to 17 July 2026. The four-day exhibition connected textile manufacturers, exporters, global buyers, fashion brands, designers and industry leaders, highlighting India's textile capabilities, manufacturing innovation, sustainable practices and international trade opportunities.
Written by the HoloBox911 team, who were on the exhibition floor at Bharat Tex 2026 · Updated 8 October 2026
Bharat Tex 2026 at a glance
What is Bharat Tex?
Bharat Tex is India's flagship global textile event, built to bring the entire textile value chain onto one floor. The Ministry of Textiles describes it as the world's largest integrated textile fair: a single platform spanning fibre and yarn, fabrics, garments, home textiles, technical textiles, handlooms, handicrafts and the machinery and intelligent manufacturing technologies behind them.
The 2026 edition was the third. Bharat Tex launched in 2024 and has run annually since, growing in scale with each edition. It is anchored in the Prime Minister's 5F vision for textiles, which traces the chain from Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign, and it is designed to show that whole chain working as one national capability rather than as separate trades.
Why that matters is a question of trade. Textiles and apparel are among India's largest manufacturing and export sectors and the country's second largest employer after agriculture. For an international buyer, a single event that covers raw fibre through to a finished garment removes the need to visit several specialised shows. For an Indian manufacturer or exporter, particularly an MSME, it is one of the few occasions where overseas buyers, state investment agencies, machinery suppliers and policymakers are all within walking distance.
What happens at Bharat Tex
The format combines a trade exhibition with a structured business and policy programme. The published components are:
- An exhibition covering the full value chain, from fibre and yarn to finished apparel, home textiles and technical textiles
- Reverse buyer-seller meets and curated business-to-business meetings between exhibitors and international buyers
- The Global Textile Dialogue, a knowledge programme of panels, roundtables and master classes
- State pavilions and investor sessions, where Indian states present cluster capability, infrastructure and policy support
- Policy dialogues, bilateral sessions and an International Pavilion for cross-border engagement
Bharat Tex 2026 dates and schedule
Bharat Tex 2026 ran for four days, from Tuesday 14 July to Friday 17 July 2026, at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. Union Minister of Textiles Shri Giriraj Singh inaugurated the event on the opening day. The organisers did not publish a public hall-by-hall timetable, so the table below sets out what the Press Information Bureau reported for each stage of the show rather than session times.
| Date | What was reported |
|---|---|
| Tuesday 14 July 2026 | Opening day. The Union Minister of Textiles inaugurated the event, joined by the Minister of State for Textiles, the Secretary of the Ministry, state ministers and ministerial delegations from Russia and New Zealand. State Investor Connect sessions began. |
| Wednesday 15 – Friday 17 July 2026 | Exhibition, buyer-seller meetings and the knowledge programme ran across all remaining days. Day two focused on state opportunities and trade partnerships; day three on sustainable textiles, circularity and skills. Figures published on 17 July cover the first three days. |
Where was Bharat Tex 2026 held?
Bharat Tex 2026 was held at Bharat Mandapam, the International Exhibition-cum-Convention Centre at Pragati Maidan in central New Delhi. The complex opened in 2023 and covers roughly 123 acres, combining large exhibition halls with a convention centre whose main hall seats about 7,000 people and an amphitheatre seating around 3,000. The exhibition at Bharat Tex 2026 was spread across more than 16 lakh square feet. Published descriptions of the hall count and total floor area differ between sources, so this guide does not state them. For visitors, the venue is served by the Supreme Court metro station on the Blue Line, which connects directly into the Pragati Maidan complex and was itself renamed from Pragati Maidan station. The site sits beside Mathura Road and the Pragati Maidan tunnel, with on-site parking, and it is close to Delhi's central business and government district. Its scale, its transport links and its ability to host exhibition halls, conference rooms and a convention centre on one site are what make it suitable for an event of this size.
Who organises Bharat Tex?
Bharat Tex is an industry-led initiative. The distinction between who runs it and who supports it matters, and the Ministry of Textiles is explicit about it.
Bharat Tex Trade Federation (BTTF)
The organiser is the Bharat Tex Trade Federation, an umbrella body of 11 textile-related Export Promotion Councils and other industry organisations. Shri Naren Goenka is its Chairman and Shri Bhadresh Dodhia its Co-Chairman. Bringing the councils under one federation is what allows a single event to cover segments that would otherwise each hold their own trade fair.
Ministry of Textiles, Government of India
The Ministry supports the event rather than running it. Union Minister of Textiles Shri Giriraj Singh launched the 2026 edition in March 2026 and inaugurated it in July; Minister of State Shri Pabitra Margherita and Secretary Smt. Neelam Shami Rao also took part. The Ministry's role covers policy framing, export promotion and convening, and it is the source of most of the official figures reported for the event.
States and participating bodies
Eight states sponsored the 2026 edition: Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Nine more states and union territories took part as exhibitors: Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Odisha, Manipur, Rajasthan and West Bengal. The United Nations and the European Union were represented institutionally.
Industry sponsors
Key sponsors named for the 2026 edition were Trident, Vardhman Textiles, RSWM, Shahi Exports, Colorjet, Arvind, PDS Limited and Sattva. More than 50 partner agencies supported the knowledge programme.
Bharat Tex 2026 theme and industry focus
The Ministry of Textiles framed the 2026 edition around the line "Weaving Indian Textiles Excellence into Fabric of Global Growth". The underlying structure is the 5F vision, which runs Farm to Fibre to Factory to Fashion to Foreign. That is not a slogan so much as a floor plan: the exhibition is laid out to follow the value chain, and the segments below are the ones it covers.
Fibre, yarn, fabric and processing
The upstream half of the chain: natural and man-made fibres, spinning and yarn, woven and knitted fabrics, dyeing, printing and finishing. India's position here rests on domestic cotton and a large spinning base, which is why fibre security was one of the knowledge programme's stated themes.
Apparel, fashion, home textiles and craft
The downstream half: garments and apparel manufacturing, fashion and design, home textiles, and India's handloom and handicraft traditions. This is where most export buying happens, and where design capability rather than capacity is the differentiator. The 2026 edition also showcased textile clusters including Tirupur, Ichalkaranji and Ahmedabad.
Technical textiles, machinery, sustainability and circularity
Technical textiles are engineered fabrics made for a function rather than an appearance: medical, protective, agricultural, geotextile, automotive and industrial applications. They sit alongside textile machinery and intelligent manufacturing technology, and alongside sustainability and circularity, which the Ministry named as a special focus area together with technical textiles, MSME integration, innovation and global market access. For exporters, sustainability compliance is increasingly a condition of market access rather than a differentiator, which is why it was given its own strand in the programme.
Highlights of Bharat Tex 2026
Investment commitments and state participation
The clearest outcome reported from the floor was investment. Across the first three days the event catalysed around ₹14,300 crore of textile investment commitments and more than 30 memoranda of understanding signed by states. Chief Ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Punjab attended, alongside senior ministers from Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The larger state commitments reported were:
- Andhra Pradesh: ₹4,100 crore
- Karnataka: ₹2,821 crore, with 11,020 jobs projected
- Bihar: ₹1,476 crore, with more than 40,500 jobs projected
- Maharashtra: ₹1,095 crore. Separately, RE&UP announced an investment of ₹4,800 crore in India
Global buyers, knowledge sessions and innovation
Alongside the trade floor, the event ran a large structured programme. Ministerial delegations came from New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Russia, Cambodia and Portugal, with more than 30 industry and business delegations from countries including the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, South Korea, the UAE, Australia, France and Germany. Two strands stood out:
- 100 knowledge sessions and 600+ experts: the Global Textile Dialogue covered global trade dynamics, sustainability and circularity, artificial intelligence, responsible sourcing, technical textiles and investment, drawing policymakers, CXOs and academics. The published plan comprised 39 panel discussions, 16 roundtables, 37 master classes and 8 state sessions.
- The Sanrachna Hackathon at the TBD Pavilion, where students and young innovators presented technical textile solutions ranging from protective garments for farmers to diabetic wound-care products and insulated mattresses for extreme climates. The event also ran exposure visits for more than 250 entrepreneurs and weavers from Aspirational Districts.
Bharat Tex 2026 in numbers
The figures below come from the Press Information Bureau, which published them on 17 July 2026 covering the first three days of the event, unless marked otherwise. Pre-event projections are labelled as projections, and industry-wide figures are attributed to their source. No final four-day totals were published.
The full figures
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Exhibitors (first three days) | 1,647 |
| Business visitors (first three days) | Nearly 95,000, with over 20,000 repeat visits |
| Buyers (first three days) | 11,315, including 6,090 international buyers |
| Countries represented | 138, plus 3,461 delegates |
| Exhibition area | More than 16 lakh sq ft |
| Business meetings (first three days) | More than 28,500 B2B, plus over 100 B2G and G2G |
| Investment commitments | Around ₹14,300 crore, with 30+ MoUs signed |
| Pre-event projection (March 2026) | 3,500+ exhibitors, 7,000+ international buyers, 1,30,000+ trade visitors |
| India's textile and apparel exports, FY2025-26 | ₹3,25,339 crore provisional (DGCIS); about US$ 35.5 billion (IBEF) |
Event figures are the Press Information Bureau's, published 17 July 2026 and covering the first three days only; the pre-event row is a projection made at the March 2026 launch, not a result. Industry figures are from DGCIS provisional data and the India Brand Equity Foundation. Some secondary reports give a much higher visitor count, which conflicts with the official figure and is not used here.
