A standards expert has asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to "save Indian mica", warning that a mineral vital to electric cars, power grids and defence electronics is leaving the country cheaply, mostly to China, and largely uncounted.
NEW DELHI: Raoul Prem Menon calls mica "electric gold." Most people have never heard of it.
The shimmering, paper-thin mineral sits inside the motors that turn wind turbines, the cables that keep metro trains running during a fire, and the battery packs of electric cars, where sheets of mica stop one overheating cell from setting the next ablaze. It gives lipstick its sparkle and car paint its pearl.
"Every lipstick, every shimmer, every highlighter on a global shelf owes something to a mine in India," said Rohit Gandhi, a member of the Indian Mica Council. "The world needs Indian mica. The question is whether India knows what it holds."
India is one of the world's largest exporters of it. Yet by one measure, its own official statistics account for less than one per cent of what it ships abroad.
Now Mr. Menon, who describes himself as a scientific mica expert on an electrotechnical committee of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), has taken his case to the top. In a recent advertisement in The Times of India, he appealed directly to Prime Minister Modi to intervene, arguing that India should treat mica the way China treats its rare earths: as a strategic resource, and a bargaining chip.
"India has mica, you need it; give us access to rare earths - sort of a barter system," Mr. Menon said, according to NewsBytes, which reported the appeal on October 5.
The question is whether New Delhi is ready to play that card, and whether, as things stand, it can.
The scale of what is slipping past the state is striking.
In 2020, the British Geological Survey estimated India's mica production at about 1,000 tonnes. That same year, Indian customs records show the country exported at least 161,000 tonnes, according to an analysis for the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI), an industry and civil-society coalition. That is roughly what China and Madagascar, two of the world's biggest producers, were recorded as producing combined.
By that comparison, more than 99 per cent of the mica India sent abroad that year had no recorded origin.
The researchers who ran the numbers, the French group BASIC, wrote that the disparity "points to the fact that much of the mining in India is currently illegal – outside the purview of the state – and therefore cannot be tracked by the authorities."
Other production estimates narrow the gap without closing it. The US Geological Survey estimates India produced about 15,000 tonnes of scrap and flake mica that year, plus 1,000 tonnes of higher-grade sheet mica. Even on those numbers, roughly nine in every ten tonnes exported cannot be matched to recorded output.
The mica itself passes through customs at ports such as Kolkata and Mundra with paperwork and prices attached. It is at the other end of the chain, in the forests and abandoned mine shafts of eastern India, that the state loses sight of it.
Most of India's mica comes from the "mica belt" straddling Jharkhand and Bihar, around the districts of Koderma and Giridih. Large-scale legal mining there largely collapsed after India's 1980 Forest Conservation Act banned mining in forested areas. The digging did not stop. It went underground.
Today, much of the trade runs on dhibra, heaps of debris around old shafts. Families pick through them by hand for flakes of mica, which they sell to local dealers. Under the arrangements BASIC modelled for its 2023 study, pickers received about 8 rupees, less than 10 US cents, per kilogram.
Children have long been part of that labour. Non-governmental groups estimated in 2016 that at least 30,000 children were working in mica in Jharkhand and Bihar. Deaths in collapsing shafts have been reported by Reuters and Indian media. In July 2024, India's child-rights commission declared Jharkhand's mica mines "child labour-free". The declaration has not been independently verified.
The toll has drawn attention far beyond India. Mr. Gandhi was the investigations producer of an international documentary on mica mining. "My documentary reached more than 20 million people, and the question I heard most was, 'Why does this keep happening?'" he said.
From the villages, the mica moves to traders, processors and exporters, and then overwhelmingly to one destination. Shipment-level customs data compiled for Mr. Menon's campaign show China took 72 per cent of India's mica exports by weight in the 2023–24 financial year and 62 per cent in 2024–25.
There, it is ground, coated and pressed into high-value pigments and insulation. Indian mica typically sells for well under a dollar a kilogram. Pigments made from it can fetch $7 to $90. The BASIC study found that the Indian portion of the supply chain, from picking to export, captures "less than 1% of the price of final products in all cases."
"China is actually procuring most of the raw material from India," Mr. Menon said, according to NewsBytes.
Mr. Menon's argument is that India is giving away leverage it does not know it has.
He has spent years pressing the case. He has written to the Ministry of Mines, briefed officials in New Delhi and circulated a petition through the Indian Electrical and Electronics Manufacturers' Association (IEEMA), an industry body representing about 1,100 companies.
"If the Middle East has oil; China has Rare Earths; BUT INDIA HAS MICA, the secret fuel behind every Electrical Machine," he wrote in the November 2025 petition.
His demands are sweeping:
classify mica as a critical mineral, or as a "rare earth", under India's National Critical Minerals Mission;
open more legal mines;
brand and certify exports as ethically sourced "INDIAN MICA";
impose an export duty of 500 per cent, which he says would bring natural mica's price closer to that of its synthetic substitute.
In a letter to the Ministry of Mines after an April 2026 meeting, he described mica as "the secret fuel behind the world's sustainable energy systems."
He has also suggested a gentler tool, a minimum export price, with the proceeds funding processing at home, according to NewsBytes.
Mr. Menon is also an interested party. He is director of research at Lakshmanan Isola (LAKSOLA), a company that makes mica insulation, a point he makes openly in his letters. Domestic manufacturers like his could benefit if export curbs kept more raw mica in India.
The comparison Mr. Menon reaches for is deliberate, and topical.
In April 2025, China placed seven medium and heavy rare earth elements under export licensing. In October it extended its controls, including to some foreign-made products containing Chinese rare earths. Car factories from Europe to India scrambled for magnets.
Beijing suspended the October measures after US President Donald Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, but only for a year. That truce was due to expire on November 10. In late September, China's commerce ministry said its trade arrangements with Washington had been extended to January 10, 2027, without specifying whether the rare-earth reprieve was included.
India has felt the squeeze directly. Indian automakers faced magnet shortages in 2025, and the first Chinese licences granted to Indian importers barred use in defence applications.
To Mr. Menon, the lesson is obvious. India, he argues, should hold something the world cannot easily do without.
New Delhi has begun to take mica more seriously. In February 2025, weeks after approving a national mission on critical minerals, the Ministry of Mines reclassified mica from a "minor" mineral, regulated by states, to a "major" one, bringing mines under the Indian Bureau of Mines.
But the move was aimed at the lithium, beryllium and other critical minerals often found in the same rocks. Mica is still not on India's list of 30 critical minerals, published in 2023.
Mr. Menon's call to classify mica as a "rare earth" faces a definitional hurdle. Rare earths are a specific group of 17 metallic elements, and mica is a silicate mineral. The realistic route is critical-mineral status, which would open the door to exploration funding, processing incentives and a place in national stockpiling plans.
There are harder questions about leverage, too.
Supply share. Mr. Menon say India holds about 80 per cent of the world's mica deposits, but neither cites a source. USGS figures suggest India accounts for something closer to a quarter to a third of global natural mica supply, depending on how its unrecorded output is counted. China and Madagascar both mine large volumes of their own.
US exposure runs through China. The United States relies entirely on imports for sheet mica. Between 2021 and 2024, 73 per cent of those imports came from China and 4 per cent from India, according to the USGS.
Mutual dependence. India's mica trade depends heavily on its biggest buyer. Mr. Menon's own presentation to the ministry acknowledges that Indian miners "rely entirely on Chinese buyers."
Substitutes. Synthetic mica already exists. BASIC found that it is "in most cases" not yet a substitute for natural mica, but a steep price rise could change that calculation.
Enforcement. A tax at the port on mica that the state cannot trace to its source could simply push more of the trade into the shadows.
Mr. Menon see those as reasons to act faster, not to stand still. If India legalised and tracked the trade, they argue, built its own processing industry and kept more of the value at home, it would control a supply chain that electric-vehicle makers, grid operators and defence contractors cannot easily replace.
The BASIC study suggests that cleaning up the trade would cost buyers little. Paying mica pickers a living income would add less than 0.1 per cent to the retail price of most products made with mica, and nearly $4.50 at most to the price of an electric car.
The Ministry of Mines has not publicly responded to Mr. Menon's appeal.
The decision ahead of New Delhi is less about a label than about whether it wants to govern a trade it has long left to the informal economy. Recognising mica as a critical mineral would be the first signal. Counting it, legalising it and processing it at home would determine whether that signal means anything.
"We have treated mica as a commodity to be dug up and moved on," Mr. Gandhi said. "It is a strategic asset, and strategic assets are managed, not leaked."
China's rare-earth truce is approaching its deadline. If it lapses, governments around the world will again be reminded what control of a mineral is worth.
India has the mica. Whether it also has the will to claim it may be decided in the months ahead.