BHATTA MITRA DIARIES - 2025-2026 - Season Overview - English

 

On the Ground This Season: My Offline Experiences with Bhatta Owners

What I Found Was an Industry That Had Already Given Up. And Why I Haven't.

This post was not written from an office. Not from a dashboard. Not from a clean desk with a cup of tea and a good internet connection.

It was written from a season spent back in the field — close to the kilns, close to the work, close to the people who have been doing this work for longer than I have.

I am a brick kiln owner from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh. I have been in this industry since 2013. I started Bhatta Mitra in 2025 — not because I had a great idea in a boardroom, but because after twelve years of living every problem this industry has to offer, I had run out of patience waiting for someone else to fix it.

But this season — 2025-26 — I stepped away from the platform and went back to where it all began. Back to the bhatta. Back to the people.

What I found was not what I expected.

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What I Expected to Find

After twelve years in this industry, I thought I knew its problems well. Coal that arrives short or mixed. Labour that disappears after taking the advance. No digital marketplace. Buyers who bargain like the kiln owner has no other choice. A system that takes the bricks and forgets the people who make them.

I knew all of this. I had lived all of this. What I was not prepared for was what lay underneath.

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What I Actually Found

I sat with brick kiln owners this season. Not as someone with answers. Not as a founder pitching a platform. Just as one of them — another man who has spent his life managing workers, watching the sky before monsoon, and negotiating with suppliers who smile while they cheat you.

And across different conversations — different owners, different kilns, different states — the same feeling kept rising to the surface. Quiet. Resigned. Something I had not seen before, or perhaps had not been close enough to notice.

These were men who had built more of India than they would ever be credited for. Men whose kilns had fired the bricks in hospitals, schools, homes and factories across the subcontinent. Men who knew this work better than anyone.

And they had already decided it was over.

Not loudly. Not with protest or anger. But in the way they spoke about their sons — relieved that the boys had found other work. In the way they described their kilns — not with plans for next season, but with the quiet arithmetic of a man counting what remains. In the way they said, simply, that this work was not for the future.

They had not given up on their kilns. They had given up on the idea that anyone would ever fix what was broken. They had accepted what they saw as inevitable — the slow, quiet extinction of the brick kiln owner. And I sat with that , for a long time.

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No Innovation. No Succession. No Belief.

What I saw this season was not crisis. Crisis makes noise. This was silence.

Kilns running on the same methods as thirty years ago. Not because the owners didn't know that better technology existed. Because they had stopped believing that better was meant for them. Why invest in a future you have already written off?

The patheras — those skilled moulders whose hands have shaped millions of bricks over decades — are retiring. And the younger generation is not learning the craft. Not because the skill is dying, but because nobody is choosing it. An entire generation looking at any other livelihood and choosing it over the kiln.

And the owners themselves — men who have the land, the knowledge, the experience to change things — have quietly made a decision that no government report will ever capture. They have decided this industry is not worth passing to their children. Not because they don't love their work. Because they love their children more than they love the idea of watching them go through what they went through.

The peshagi scene is not a story in this industry. It is a tax. One that every bhatta owner pays sooner or later. I paid mine. More than once.

That is not weakness. That is a generation making the most painful kind of rational decision.

And sitting with it — across conversation after conversation this season — something shifted in me.

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And Then Came the Coal

Into this already fragile season came the coal crisis of 2025-26.

The Iran-US tensions in early 2026 disrupted the coal import chains that Indian brick kilns quietly depend on. Global uncertainty became a cover for the big traders — the men sitting between the coal mines and the kilns — to run their own games.

They took advances at the start of the season. Promised fixed rates. Then stopped supplying when global prices moved. The coal that did arrive came mixed — low-grade material, stones, wet coal — dressed up as the grade that had been paid for. By the time a kiln owner fired his kiln and saw the results in his bricks, the supplier was unreachable. No accountability. No recourse. Nothing.

Prices doubled mid-season when kilns were already committed to buyers, already deep in their firing cycles, with nowhere to turn. And kiln owners — already running on thin margins, already carrying the weight of a season with too few workers and no innovation and a quiet sense of an industry losing faith in itself — absorbed losses they could not afford.

I watched this happen. From close enough to feel it. But this season felt different. Not because the problems were new. Because the people carrying them had stopped believing anything would ever change.

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Every Bhatta Owner Has a Number

Every brick kiln owner I know has a number. The amount lost to coal mixing. The peshgi that never came back. The bricks that sat unsold because there was no way to reach a buyer two districts away. The season cut short by an early monsoon with no insurance, no compensation, no one to call.

After twelve years, mine had grown large enough that I had two choices.

Accept it as the cost of doing business in this industry Or build something that makes sure the next generation of bhatta owners never has to pay it.

I chose to build.

But this season changed why I am building.

It is no longer just about connecting kilns to buyers, or verified coal suppliers, or fraud reporting — though all of that matters deeply and all of it is being built. It is about something more fundamental. It is about changing what a bhatta owner believes is possible for himself. Because the real crisis I found this season was not coal prices or labour shortage or the disruption from half a world away.

It was belief. An entire industry — 140,000 kilns, fifteen million workers, 250 billion bricks a year, the second largest brick producing nation on earth — quietly losing faith in its own future.

And I refuse to accept that as inevitable.

— — —

The Farmer Feeds India. The Bhatta Owner Builds It.

We know the farmer's name. When he struggles, the nation notices. Relief funds are announced. Ministers visit. His losses are mourned publicly, as they should be.

The bhatta owner has been building this country for generations. Every home you have ever lived in. Every school, every hospital, every factory wall — built with bricks fired in a kiln by someone who started work before the mist lifted off the fields, who managed hundreds of workers through a season, who negotiated with suppliers and watched the sky and counted his losses quietly at the end of each year.

It is time we knew his name.

It is time this industry stopped accepting its own extinction as inevitable.

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To Every Bhatta Owner Who Has Already Made That Decision

If you are reading this and you have already decided — quietly, privately — that this is your last season, or that your children will build something else, I am not here to tell you that your experience was wrong.

Twelve years in this field gives me no authority to say that. I have made the same calculations. I know what they feel like.

But before you close the chapter — I want you to see one thing. The problems you faced were not permanent features of this industry. They were the result of nobody having built the right infrastructure yet. That is what Bhatta Mitra is building. Not for investors. Not for a pitch deck. For the bhatta owner who should be able to inherit a business that comes with verified suppliers, direct market access, digital tools and the dignity this work has always deserved but rarely received.

For his son — who should be able to inherit something worth inheriting.

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Bhatta Mitra is India and Nepal's first complete digital ecosystem for the brick kiln industry — a marketplace to sell bricks directly without brokers, a verified coal supplier network, a labour contractor system, a fraud reporting tool, and a knowledge hub built for the people who have been running this industry on gut feeling and prayer for too long.

It was built from a bhatta. In Saharanpur. By someone who has counted every loss this industry has to offer — and decided to build the solution instead of accepting the losses.

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Bhatta Mitra™ — Friend in Your Need.

Built by a kiln owner. For every kiln owner who still believes this industry has a future worth fighting for.

By Varun Goel  ·  Brick Kiln Owner since 2013  ·  Saharanpur, UP  ·  Founder, Bhatta Mitra™