In Hyderabad, a quiet industrial milestone is arriving right on schedule. Midwest Energy — the technology and clean-energy arm of the Midwest Business House — is putting the finishing touches on what is reported to be India’s first plant to manufacture sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) rare-earth permanent magnets at home. The plant has been in trial production, with commercial output targeted from mid-October 2026, and it takes aim at one of Indian manufacturing’s most stubborn import dependencies.
Image: Midwest Energy (official company image) — the Midwest Energy logo.
The missing middle of India’s clean-energy supply chain
NdFeB magnets are among the strongest permanent magnets known, and they sit at the heart of modern electric motors, wind-turbine generators, smartphones, MRI machines and a growing list of defence systems. India’s Ministry of Heavy Industries has identified sintered NdFeB magnets as a strategic material class — and for good reason. India mines rare earths and refines oxides, but until now, essentially every sintered NdFeB magnet used in an Indian factory has been imported; the country imports almost 100% of its requirement, as the Economic Times reported in September.
Midwest Energy’s plant changes that arithmetic. Built with an initial investment of around ₹250 crore — the Technology Development Board’s official project listing puts the budget at ₹250.86 crore, with ₹125 crore of TDB assistance — the facility starts at 500 tonnes a year, with a roadmap to 5,000 tonnes by December 2027 on an investment of up to ₹2,000 crore. Samples are already being tested by several EV and wind-energy companies, and sources close to the project estimate that at scale it could displace 15–20% of India’s import dependence within three to five years.
A government lab’s technology, scaled to a TRL-9 plant
What makes the project genuinely indigenous is the process technology behind it. It comes from the Non-Ferrous Materials Technology Development Centre (NFTDC), an R&D institution under the Ministry of Mines, whose molten salt electrolysis (MSE) route — with proprietary cell designs — was transferred to Midwest Advanced Materials Pvt Ltd, the group company executing the project. The Technology Development Board sanctioned funding in May 2024, describing the resulting TRL-9 demonstration plant as a trailblazing initiative spanning the full chain from finished magnets back to rare-earth oxide. Raw materials will come from Indian Rare Earths Ltd (IREL), and the plant itself was built with domestically designed, low-cost plant and machinery — which the TDB notes keeps capital costs far below imported equivalents.
From mine to magnet
The ambition runs deeper than a single plant. The company describes itself as a mine-to-magnet operation: sister concern Midwest Ltd has secured monazite mines in Sri Lanka to secure the long-term feedstock roadmap, and the group is pursuing incentives under the government’s rare-earth magnet schemes. Midwest Energy — in a joint venture with Midwest Advanced Materials — is also among the 20 bidders under the Ministry of Heavy Industries’ ₹7,280-crore Scheme to Promote Manufacturing of Sintered Rare Earth Permanent Magnets, whose technical bids were opened in August 2026.
More Read
Batteries today, magnets tomorrow
Magnets are only half the story. The same Hyderabad group has already brought a 1.2 GW battery energy storage system plant in Bengaluru into commercial production this July, and is shifting its R&D operations from Hyderabad to Bengaluru as the team grows. Between batteries and magnets, Midwest Energy is assembling the two most import-dependent links of India’s clean-energy hardware stack under one roof.
For a country racing to electrify transport, build wind capacity and secure its defence supply chains, a domestic source of the strongest magnets on Earth is the kind of quiet, foundational win that compounds for decades.
