Four generations of one family, one mineral, and a district that has been through every boom and bust the mining industry can produce.
Manganese came to light in Central India by accident. The British, connecting the country by highway, kept striking a material that was unusually hard and difficult to break. Samples were sent for analysis, and the answer came back: manganese ore.
What followed was systematic. Geologists and survey teams were sent across the region to establish where the ore lay and in what quantity. The Ram Rama mine — the mine our family has worked ever since — was one of those the British opened.
That is where the manganese story of Central India begins, and where ours does too.
Mining is cyclical, and Balaghat has felt every turn of it. What changed at Ram Rama was the method; what did not change was that it kept working.
Through those transitions came the regulation: mining law, forest law, the Forest Conservation Act, environmental clearance, lease areas modified and re-modified. Each change had to be complied with, and each one reshaped how the mine could be worked.
Recessions did the rest. Of the hundreds of mines once operating in Balaghat, most eventually closed. Ram Rama did not — and the accumulated experience of working it through open cast, underground and mechanised phases is the most valuable thing the group owns.
By the mid-2000s the logic was hard to argue with. We were mining manganese and selling it to ferro alloy producers who added the value. The idea of doing that ourselves came in 2005.
The plant was established at Balaghat in 2007, and deliberately built with its own power plant — Madhya Pradesh had a power shortage at the time, and a smelting operation without reliable power is not an operation. Balaghat is rice country, so the power plant was designed to burn rice husk, the waste the local rice mills were producing anyway. Operations were inaugurated in 2009.
A second unit followed in 2017. In 2024 we added three more furnaces under a third unit, taking the group to five running furnaces.
Found by the British during highway construction; survey teams establish the deposits and the Ram Rama mine is opened.
Open cast gives way to underground, then to vertical shafts and mechanisation, through repeated industry downturns and successive regulatory regimes.
Rather than continue supplying ore to alloy producers, the group resolves to manufacture ferro alloys itself.
Built at Balaghat with a captive power plant designed to run on rice husk from local rice mills.
Ferro alloy production begins in Madhya Pradesh.
Capacity added as domestic demand grows.
Expansion takes the group to five running furnaces and opens the door to export markets at scale.
The rice-husk plant has given way to solar generation, and expansion is underway in both mining capacity and alloy production.
The group was established by four members of the Trivedi family. It is run today by the third generation, with the work divided along the lines each knows best.
Director — Mining & Procurement
Leads ore procurement and the technical side of mining: understanding manganese ore, the methods that suit each deposit, where value can be added and where cost can be taken out. Has travelled extensively to manganese operations in Brazil, Japan, Oman and South Africa to study how other producers work and what can be brought home.
Director — Operations, Marketing & Sales
Runs operations along with marketing, sales and customer relationships — negotiation, judging which markets suit which material, and building the long relationships this trade depends on. Led the group's move into export markets, including the long-term agreement with a Japanese buyer.
Ram Rama sits in a remote, largely tribal area with seasonal crops and no irrigation. When the mine opened it became one of the few reliable sources of employment in the district, and it has been the backbone of the local economy since.
The effect compounds. Where two or three members of a household earn, the whole family's standing changes — economically and socially. We have watched workers' children go into education and come back as supervisors, managers and foremen, and we have watched people trained here go on to make their name at other mines entirely.
Training, upskilling and better wages are not a corporate programme here. They are what a mine that stays open for a century actually does.
