Vikas Proppant & Granite Ltd began life in 1994 as a guar-gum exporter, but when that industry collapsed after 2013 it pivoted to a niche industrial idea: crushing granite waste into tiny ceramic beads called proppants, which are pumped into oil wells to keep fractures open during extraction. The recurring approach is to take a raw-material advantage - first guar seeds in Haryana, then granite rubble near Jodhpur - and try to turn it into a specialised product for a global market, though the company has spent more of its recent life in corporate restructuring than in production.
Business segments
A single operating idea - mining and processing granite into oilfield proppants - that has been dormant, while the company itself has been under insolvency resolution.
1. Proppant manufacturing: oilfield ceramics from granite waste
The company set out to make hydraulic-fracturing proppants from discarded granite cuttings, but the plant has not run in recent reporting periods.
- Waste turned into a premium product - proppants are tiny, high-strength spheres that hold open cracks in oil-bearing rock during fracking, and the company planned to manufacture them from waste cuttings of granite stone rather than from virgin raw materials, which would have lowered input costs.
- Located at the source - the mining site and the majority of the company’s fixed assets sit at Kaprada in Jodhpur district, Rajasthan, one of India’s richest granite regions, so transport costs on heavy stone were meant to be minimal.
- An in-house lab that kept working - the company maintained a research and development centre focused on upgrading existing products to meet international specifications, developing environmentally friendlier processes, and finding ways to use non-renewable resources more responsibly, even while the plant was idle.
- Dependent on policy and price - the business is exposed to government mining regulations and to price fluctuation, which the company itself flagged as a persistent uncertainty for the industry.
- Idle when it should have been producing - as of the quarters ending June 2021 and December 2021, the plant was not in operation, and by FY21 the company’s entire reported turnover came from selling guar gum, not proppants or granite.
Group structure and partners
A standalone company with no subsidiaries, a concentrated promoter holding, and a board that was suspended when the company entered insolvency in August 2022.
- No group companies - the company has no subsidiary, joint venture or associate, so all its activities sit inside a single corporate entity.
- Tight promoter ownership - as of FY21, the promoter group held roughly 22% of the shares, with Bimla Devi Jindal alone holding over 19% and Kamini Jindal holding another 2.6%.
- An employee stock plan in place - under the Vikas Gran Employees Stock Option Plan 2018, the company allotted 85 lakh shares to an employee welfare trust during FY21.
- Management reset, then suspended - after the sudden death of promoter B.D. Aggarwal in September 2020, a new board took charge in June 2021 led by Executive Managing Director Jaswinder Singh, but its powers were suspended in August 2022 when the NCLT admitted an insolvency petition filed by an operational creditor over a default of about ₹1.23 crore for supplied guar beans.
- Resolution professional now in control - an interim resolution professional was appointed, later replaced by Mr. Arpan Maheshkumar Shah, and in February 2023 a resolution plan submitted by Mr. Kailashchand Mittal was approved by 100% of the committee of creditors, with an application filed before the NCLT for final approval.