Why shoes sold in India so often don't fit Indian feet

The problem is shape, not size. And sizing up is the wrong tool for it.

Black-and-white illustration, seen from above: a bare foot on a sheet of paper, heel to the wall, a pencil mark at the longest toe and a steel ruler alongside.
Heel to the wall, a mark at the longest toe: the two minutes the piece describes.

In short

Many shoes sold here are built on global lasts, drawn once for a worldwide range and used unchanged in India. The Indian foot differs from those lasts mainly in shape: broader through the forefoot and the waist, and flatter rather than higher. More width, not more volume. Since the only adjustment most shops offer is length, the standard workaround is to buy a bigger size. That trade is worse than it looks. CLRI has developed a sizing system for Indian feet, the Bha sizing system, where your size is your foot length in millimetres.

What does a shoe size actually measure?

Not your foot.

A shoe is built around a last: a solid form, foot-shaped but not foot-identical, which the upper is shaped over and the sole attached to. The size on the box refers to that last. It is why two brands in the same nominal size fit differently, and why both labels are correct.

Nearly every shoe sold in India runs on the UK sizing system. A scale never taken from Indian feet.

This isn't about where a brand comes from. Plenty of Indian brands build on the same global lasts, drawn once for a worldwide range and shipped everywhere unchanged.

Length is the only dimension most size systems carry. Width exists as a fitting, the letter grades. India's own standard, IS 1638, names G as the medium English fitting here and H as the next one up. But fittings are rarely stocked in Indian shops, so in practice you have exactly one lever. Length.

Which is unfortunate, because length is not the problem.

What's different about Indian feet?

The reference work is the UNIDO-⁠CLRI foot survey, run to establish whether Indian feet were adequately served by European lasts. Its central finding was that the difference is one of shape, not nominal size.

The strongest of its findings was a wider forepart and waist. The forefoot and midfoot are broader relative to length than the lasts in use assumed.

The second is the one usually lost in translation: lower and flatter, not simply bigger. The Indian foot in that survey was not a European foot scaled up. It was broader, and comparatively lower through the forepart. Extra width, not extra height.

There was also a different heel-to-ball relationship, a relatively shorter forepart, which changes where the shoe ought to flex.

And there was meaningful regional variation, which is worth saying plainly. "The Indian foot" is a working generalisation. Any sizing system is an average, and this one is too.

The conclusion the survey drew was structural. India needed lasts of its own rather than European lasts enlarged or lengthened. New shape, not more of the same shape. What follows is what happens when that gets ignored.

Why doesn't sizing up fix it?

Because a bigger shoe is mostly a longer shoe.

India's footwear standard, IS 1638, publishes the real dimensions of every size. Take a man with a 270mm foot, a UK 8, who finds the shoe tight across the front and goes up a full size to find room.

He gains about 8.5mm of length. Most of a centimetre of extra shoe in front of his toes.

Across the widest part of his foot, where the problem is, he gains 2mm.

Four times as much length as width, when width was the only thing he was after.

Outline of a shoe last seen from above, marked A at the toe where length is measured and B across the widest part where width is measured.
A · Length+8.5 mm
B · Width+2 mm
Fig. 1 Going up one size, UK 8 to UK 9: what each dimension gains.

Both bars drawn to one scale. The outline only shows where each dimension is measured. Figures from IS 1638.

The length isn't all that arrives, either. A bigger size is bigger everywhere, so the shoe also opens up around the arch and around the heel, by roughly 8mm of circumference. He is now in a shoe that is too long at the front and looser at the back than the one he started with.

That second part matters more than it sounds. A shoe that fits holds your heel as you walk. The heel lifts at every step, and the counter and the laces catch it. Add length and the foot can slide forward and back inside the shoe. Loosen the heel and there is less holding it when it does. Whether that becomes actual slipping depends on your heel, the stiffness of the counter, how you lace it. Often it doesn't. But it is why a man who sizes up for comfort can end up with a shoe that fits worse in a different way.

Four times as much length as width, when width was the only thing he was after.

And most of us, having done this for years, quietly concluded that the problem was our feet. It wasn't. It was the last.

What did India do about it?

Measured itself.

Between December 2021 and March 2022, CSIR-⁠CLRI - the Central Leather Research Institute in Chennai, the world's largest leather research institute by published research - ran a survey across 79 locations in five zones of the country, 3D-scanning the feet of 1,01,880 people.

The expectation going in was that India would be too varied for one system. A country this large and this mixed, the thinking went, would need several. The survey found the opposite. One system could cover it.

That system is Bha - bha, for Bharat.

Two things change under it. Your size becomes a measurement of your own foot: Bha sizes are foot length in millimetres, rounded up to the nearest five. A 281mm foot is a Bha 285. Nothing to convert, and no other country's scale sitting in between.

And the lasts are drawn to Indian proportions - broader through the forefoot, at the correct length, instead of a last scaled up in search of width.

Very few brands have built on it.

Measuring your foot length

Two minutes.

  1. A bare foot standing on a sheet of paper on the floor, heel against a wall.

    1 Heel to the wall, weight on the foot.

  2. The same foot seen from above, a pencil marking the paper at the tip of the longest toe.

    2 Mark the longest toe.

  3. The paper seen from above with the pencil mark, and a ruler laid from the wall to the mark.

    3 Measure from the wall, in millimetres.

Fig. 2 Measuring your foot length.

Stand with your heel against a wall, on a hard floor, with your weight on the foot. Feet spread under load, and a seated measurement reads short. Mark where your longest toe reaches, then measure from the wall in millimetres. Do both feet. Most people have one longer, and that is the one that governs.

Round up to the nearest 5mm. That is your Bha size.

Do it in the evening. Feet swell across the day, and the shoe has to fit at hour eleven, not hour one.

What we chose

Since this is our own page: Senna1 is built on a Bha last.

The reasoning is everything above. We didn't want to sell a shoe whose fit strategy was buy it a size up and hope. Once you accept that the problem is shape, a last drawn for a global range isn't something you can fix by grading it. What we were after is a correct length with a broader platform under the foot, and a heel that still holds.

We will be specific about the dimensions once the finished lasts are measured against their benchmarks at the same points. Until then we would rather describe the intent than publish a number we cannot stand behind.

Notes

Dimensions are from IS 1638, Sizes and Fitting of Footwear (Bureau of Indian Standards), English-size table for adult lasts. The morphological findings are from the UNIDO-⁠CLRI Indian foot survey. That survey supports the broader-and-lower forepart direction. It does not on its own establish comparative heel breadth, and no such claim is made here.