CHENNAI: Temples are big business, and adding to their large coffers is hair. Yes, hair.
Almost every major temple makes money selling tonnes of hair left behind by devotees to India’s hair exporters. This business, however, has been hit hard —thanks to the European economic slowdown and Indian exporters’ perennial villain, China.
Figures from both industry sources and the Ministry of Commerce tell the tale. The past fiscal year saw human hair and related product exports fall by more than Rs 400-odd crore compared to the previous year. The total export revenue for the previous year was Rs 2,354 crore. This translates to a decline of about 17 per cent.
Indian human hair, prized for its quality of Remy hair (said to be the finest quality), largely exports raw material to manufacturing hubs across the world. According to industry sources, nearly 80 per cent of all Indian human hair exports are raw material for factories around the world. Most of this is sourced from the large and thriving temples and towns of the hinterland—Tirupati, Palani and Velankanni to name a few. Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam’s e-auction revenue from tonsured hair crossed Rs 200 crore in 2013-14. It has now dipped to Rs 173 crore.
Speaking about Chinese competition, Venkatesan Munuswamy, proprietor of the nearly 50-year-old Om Sakthi Murugan Enterprises in Chennai, said, “Their quality is quite low compared to ours, but the prices are only 30 per cent of ours.”
Neelakandan, one of the several ‘collectors’ who form the vital backbone of the logistics chain that keeps the Rs 2,500-crore Indian hair export industry on its feet, said, “What I do is visit small family temples around rural areas and buy the hair they have collected over the months. They have very small amounts of hair, a few kgs at the most. But there are a lot of them and I visit around 10 or 15 in one collection trip.” A typical haul for Neelakandan and others like him across the country is 10-20 kg, which they then sell to ‘collectors’ higher up in the supply chain or directly to exporters.
What makes this a lucrative business is the large range of the quality of hair that they collect. Some bunches can fetch them as much as Rs 16,000 per kg if it is of the right quality and length. “There are many collectors who fan out and bring in the supply. We buy a large portion of our goods from them,” said R Satyanarayan of Dove Exports. Neelakandan, however, did not prefer to divulge what he paid the temples from whom he collected the hair. Neelakandan and his ilk are a microcosm of how the Indian hair export industry works.
According to exporters, there are two kinds of hair—the high grade and prized Remy hair, itself of varying value, and the comb waste or non-Remy hair. The prices of both can vary as wildly as Rs 4 to Rs 25,000 per kg—all based on length, colour, quantity and type.
But while barber shops and other sources do belong to the supply chain for non-Remy hair, the largest sources of the high-value Remy are temples. Some like Tirupati, Palani and others—ones that see turnovers of crores of rupees— collect so much hair, so as to conduct online auctions.
The smaller ones, like those Neelakandan visits, have smaller quantities. But all have one major advantage over other sources of supply—hair from rural temples is largely unblemished by chemicals, are clean and long. A factor that puts a high prize on them is because the highest bidders, willing to shell out the thousands, are wig makers. But this is merely the bottom of the supply chain and value-addition process.
While some importers buy so much hair that they are happy with unprocessed goods, many are not. And processing adds value.
After the hair lands in the godowns of exporters, it is put through an exhaustive process—untangling, sorting and of course, wefting. “The process is expensive. The cleaning material we use costs Rs 62,000 per kg. We use perhaps a few grams per kg of hair. Wefting machines are also expensive,” said Satyanarayan.