Trade, Rules and Risk — Saraswati's WTO Bind

A four-round, advanced international-trade-law and sustainability simulation set inside Saraswati Textiles & Exports Ltd., a Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu) cotton-knitwear exporter — INR 1,180 crore revenue, 11% EBITDA (INR 130 crore), ~INR 85 crore free cash flow, 3,200 workers (60% women), a first-in-region zero-liquid-discharge plant, and 14 unaudited sub-contracted dyeing/embroidery units carrying roughly a third of dye volume. On 4 March 2026 the European Union (48% of exports) freezes a INR 96 crore spring shipment and opens a compliance review citing a new supply-chain environmental and human-rights due-diligence import measure, plus an NGO complaint alleging hazardous effluent and excessive overtime at two sub-contractors. India's trade ministry signals a WTO-style dispute calling the measure a disguised barrier. But the clocks collide: the dispute runs 18–36 months while the largest buyer (22%, INR 260 crore) will suspend orders within 30 days, a second buyer demands a third-party audit within 60 days, and the NGO publishes a named report in 45 days. Playing the General Counsel, you (1) diagnose the three exposures — legal, commercial, reputational — and rank them by severity AND speed; (2) choose a legal-compliance posture: Fight (back the WTO challenge), Comply (file an unreserved remediation plan), or Hybrid (comply commercially while reserving the trade-law argument and separating the firm from the state); (3) design a costed, time-phased human-rights due-diligence package within free cash flow — which sub-contractors to audit, remediate, in-source or responsibly exit, whether to engage the NGO, and what verifiable evidence converts a promise into compliance; and (4) integrate it into one board-and-buyer defence. The math rewards a reserved-rights hybrid, funded and verifiable remediation that protects the women workers, and proactive stakeholder engagement — and punishes the five classic general-counsel errors: litigation tunnel vision, the unreserved confession that undercuts the state's dispute, underfunded remediation auditors will expose, wholesale sub-contractor termination that relocates rather than remediates harm, and single-KPI optimisation. Four board KPIs track Legal Exposure, Market Access, Compliance Cost and Reputational Risk over an 18-month horizon.