Meanwhile, your shirt and pants were made by Indian children working for less than $2 per hour.
As a resident Indian, as far as I know (a) children have a guaranteed right to education which keeps them in school until 14 (b) children in fabric sweatshops was never an Indian thing. Children in brick kilns and beedi factories rolling beedis because of their nimble fingers used to be a thing.
India’s census figures are mostly reliable, unlikely to be off by an order of magnitude.
There are roughly 250 million child laborers globally of which 11 million are Indian children so around 4.4% of the global child labor population is Indian.
I.e., despite having 14% of the world's kids, only 4.4% are child laborers. I'd say India is moving in the right direction when it comes to child welfare.
https://www.culturalworld.org/what-percentage-of-the-worlds-...
None of the quoted stats or linked articles support the assertion that things are improving. The only trend that I can see noted is that Indian child labourers are moving to the cities to do manufacturing work and abandoning rural/agriculture work which on the face of it doesn't seem like a fully positive development development all.
People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from or how to source things ethically unless people write articles like this and push for higher standards when they see an opportunity.
It’s one thing to protect genuinely well-meaning people who can’t meet a purity standard, but OpenAI has a track record of dishonesty (starting with their name).
I don't know about other places and maybe I'm an outlier but I check everything for where it's produced / manufactured. Most if not all items in the US are required to have where the item was produced/manufactured. Some may say "Manufactured in the US with globally sourced material" makes it harder to pin down where each of the components originated from. Clothes and other items the country of origin is on the tag.