Ramnik Group Mining · Ferro Alloys · Power EN日本語
Our legacy

A hundred years in the same ground.

Four generations of one family, one mineral, and a district that has been through every boom and bust the mining industry can produce.

The discovery

Found while building a road.

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 Ramrama 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.

Through the cycles

Hundreds of mines opened here. Most did not last.

Mining is cyclical, and Balaghat has felt every turn of it. What changed at Ramrama was the method; what did not change was that it kept working.

  • Open cast — the earliest workings, taken from surface.
  • Underground — following the ore down as the surface reserves were worked out.
  • Vertical shafts — deeper access, and a different order of engineering.
  • Mechanisation — excavators, dozers, drills and tippers replacing manual work.

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. Ramrama did not — and the accumulated experience of working it through open cast, underground and mechanised phases is the most valuable thing the group owns.

Forward integration

We were selling ore to alloy plants. So we built one.

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 Sarandi, in Balaghat district, 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.

The works at Sarandi, running
Milestones

How the group took shape.

  1. Colonial era

    Manganese discovered in Central India

    Found by the British during highway construction; survey teams establish the deposits and the Ramrama mine is opened.

  2. Four generations

    The mine is worked continuously

    Open cast gives way to underground, then to vertical shafts and mechanisation, through repeated industry downturns and successive regulatory regimes.

  3. 2005

    The decision to integrate forward

    Rather than continue supplying ore to alloy producers, the group resolves to manufacture ferro alloys itself.

  4. 2007

    First ferro alloys plant established

    Built at Sarandi, Balaghat, with a captive power plant designed to run on rice husk from local rice mills.

  5. 2009

    Operations inaugurated

    Ferro alloy production begins in Madhya Pradesh.

  6. 2017

    Second unit commissioned

    Capacity added as domestic demand grows.

  7. 2024

    Third unit — three new furnaces

    Expansion takes the group to five running furnaces and opens the door to export markets at scale.

  8. Today

    Mining, alloys and solar

    The rice-husk plant has given way to solar generation, and expansion is underway in both mining capacity and alloy production.

Leadership

Run by the family, from the site.

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 — one technical, one commercial.

The third generation, running the group today

Nischal Trivedi

Director — Mining & Procurement

Technically minded from childhood, much of it spent in and around the mines, he joined the business before anyone else of his generation. His instinct is for understanding manganese ore, the methods that suit each deposit, and the problems worth chasing to their root. When too much manganese was being lost in processing, he led the work that cut the waste — and the mine's lower grades and fines, once set aside, now return to the furnaces as sinter and briquettes. Has travelled to manganese operations in Brazil, Japan, Oman and South Africa to study how other producers work and what can be brought home.

Harsh Trivedi

Director — Operations, Marketing & Sales

Grew up in Balaghat watching his family run the business, took an MBA in international marketing in the UK, and then — instead of the corporate career that usually follows — came back. He runs operations, marketing and sales: 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, and its climb up the value chain from selling ore to making finished alloy.

What the mine built

Two and three generations of the same families.

Ramrama 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.

Next

See how the ore is worked.

Mining operations Ferro alloys