The hairy story behind India’s ‘black gold’ exports

It’s an overcast Monday morning in a low-income housing colony in Bengaluru’s Kamala Nagar. Malleesh, 21, Parasuram, 21, and Ravi, 24, are on a peculiar quest. Swinging a large sack slung over one shoulder while balancing a hefty net, crammed with aluminium vessels, they make their way through the neighbourhood, hollering ‘Kudalu patre kasu’ (vessels for hair), a boisterous call in hot pursuit of something valuable to them: balls of fallen human hair. A few women step out of their houses, offering bundles of snarled tresses in exchange for a vessel. But business hasn’t been kind to them today.

The trio has been out since the crack of dawn, yet only a measly 100 grams of hair from four houses have found its way into their eager hands in five hours. Families have been haggling for bigger vessels in return for a small quantity of hair while the rains have conspired against them.

They decide to head home. Today’s hunt might not have yielded the desired results, but they will be back the next day, scouring other homes for orbs of hair that have fallen out naturally, not cut off. And for good reason. “One kilogram of black hair fetches us around Rs 3,000 in cash and vessels worth Rs 2,000 for exchange. But it takes more than a week to amass that amount. White hair fetches around Rs 1,000 and we are often short-changed with dyed hair, which is rejected by hair dealers who we sell to,” says Ravi, as he rummages through a red suitcase on his bed, pulling out spidery coils of hair in various shades stuffed inside polythene bags when we follow him to his house under the Laggere Bridge.

Ravi is new to the trade but members of his community have been collecting from private clients and the streets for over two generations. “My relatives and friends who work in construction or as domestic help laugh or shun us but waste hair collection is more lucrative than collecting paper, plastic or iron scrap for which we get a mere Rs 3 to Rs 20 per kilo,” he maintains.

Ravi’s tale is just one strand in the fabric of the global human hair trade, that begins its inconspicuous journey on the floors of Indian households and passes through a web of hands before ending up in the bustling global market of luxurious wigs and extensions gracing the heads of people a world away in Europe and America. Within this labyrinth, India is a coveted source of hair globally. Statista reveals that in 2021, India was the largest exporter of human hair worldwide, accounting for 92% of the total global export value. According to data from Global Trade Research Initiative, India’s hair exports were $682 million in FY 2023. The bulk of it is temple donations.

While Tirumala Venkateswara in Tirupati that generates close to 600 tonnes of hair annually from tonsuring rituals and a few prominent hair manufacturing companies offer the more visible aspects of the trade, it is discarded combings — those stray strands that fall out during washing or brushing— that make up a significant portion of the country’s raw hair exports. This occurs through a mesh of informal networks involving women who hoard their comb waste, itinerant hair collectors, traders, and factories. A reality that Emma Tarlo, a British anthropologist, had unearthed when she delved into the global billion-dollar hair industry between 2013 to 2016 for her book ‘Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair’.

The allure of Indian hair — often referred to as ‘black gold’ in the global market — is rooted in its distinct attributes. “The most desired hair in the market is long and chemically untreated hair labelled ‘virgin hair’ and ‘remy hair’ whose cuticles are aligned from root to tip. The hair that comes from Indian temples and comb waste meet the criteria of virgin hair if they’re chemically untreated but combings do not meet the criteria of remy hair as the cuticles are all scrambled up. However, the bulk of India's export comes from combings”, ex plains Tarlo adding that Indian hair is also valued for its finer texture, slight waves, and compatibility with European hair types.

“Also, the natural black hue of Indian hair and its association with devotion and purity because of temple tonsures makes it more coveted,” says Dipti Bapat, a social anthropologist from Delhi whose PhD on denotified tribes (DNT) and nomadic workers in India’s urban informal economy in 2016 led her to comb waste recyclers. The Waddar community in Maharashtra and Waghris in Gujarat are two DNTs with traditional expertise in door-to-door barter of fallen hair in exchange for toys, balloons, bartan, soan papdi, brooms, etc.

Though an integral part of the global hair market, hair waste collectors and untanglers eke out a handto-mouth existence on society’s fringes. “They live in the peri-urban areas for easy access to both villages and urban slums and chawls where they find a strong customer base. Fancy urban residential complexes are out of bounds,” says Bapat. “They also live with the stigma of being perceived as thieves when they’re found with bales of hair, and accused of smuggling when transporting hair without registration or identification,” says Bapat.

Ravi and Malleesh are part of a collective of 700 hair waste pickers living in suburban Bengaluru, out of a total network of 3,000 scattered across various districts in Karnataka, and hail from scheduled castes like Koracha, Sillekyatha and Nayakaru or the Hakki Pikki tribe. In Vadodara’s Gorwa, an entire settlement is engaged in hair waste collection. Meanwhile, hair untangling workshops in Karnataka’s Koppal or in Bengal villages like Baniban Jagadishpur and the Sundarbans, waste hair workers untangle, shampoo and sort hair strand by strand with their bare hands removing lice and white hair and arranging them into neat bunches before they’re exported to China, Africa or the US via Pyawbwe town in Myanmar, and lately Bangladesh.

“This is a very labour-intensive job and what Koppal, Sundarbans and Pyawbwe have in common is that they’re places where poverty levels are high and labour is cheap,” says Tarlo. Even within India, the wages vary. “For instance, Chandipur in East Midnapur is a site for manual hair sorters. The entire village handles hundreds of kilograms of hair for wages as low as Rs 50 for a 12-hour day and sometimes content with simple rewards like ‘maach-bhaat’ (fish-rice),” adds Bapat. China, with its extensive network of human hair processing factories, is the primary destination for most sorted combings where the hair is chemically treated and transformed into extensions and wigs. “The US and Europe are the largest markets for hair products, while Africa was the fastest growing when I was conducting my research,” says Tarlo. Leveraging this hidden network of vital traditional recycling communities is a “crucial intervention point,” stresses Bapat. “Empowering them would not only give them dignity and support but could also revolutionise the hair trade within India by enabling more people to store hair and transform it from a drain clogger into a valuable resource,” she says.

In a move to spotlight the hair recyclers’ economy, Hasiru Dala — an NGO in Bengaluru working with 1,900 hair pickers — launched a hair donation campaign on social media last September that saw fibrous bounties of hair donations arrive at their office in envelopes from Bengaluru and even Mumbai. “The problem is that people living in high-rises or the middle classes aren’t aware of waste hair’s potential in the world market or as a livelihood for the waste-picker community. But we are in conversation to introduce hair bins inside some apartment buildings in Bengaluru,” says Archana V, social security director at Hasiru Dala. She is optimistic that with awareness, voluntary hair donations could rise. Till then, hair pickers will have to go to great lengths to make a living.

Beyond wigs and extensions
Besides wigs and extensions, hair trade stretches into an array of applications such as industrial brushes to absorb coastal oil spills or for oil-water remediation in factories, as test swatches for shampoos, conditioners, oils and dyes, for cosmetic brushes, to extract amino acid used in cosmetic products, as a binder in plastering house walls due to its tensile strength, as well as for use in a traditional Japanese art form called ‘hair embroidery’.

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