Iron is considered as backbone of the civilized society from its inception. india is blessed with huge iron ore reserve and is the 4th largest producer of iron ore in the world. essentially, the steel industry needs iron ore as one of the most important raw materials. the iron ores are divided into two classes: high-grade ore and low-grade ore depending upon the iron and impurity content. the steel industry requires mostly the high-grade iron ore. the low-grade iron ore are generally consisting of lower percentage of iron and higher percentage of alumina, which is not desirable for blast-furnace operation because it interrupts the productivity of steel by raising slag viscosity and volumes. the mining and processing of iron ore generates large number of fine particles with particle size between 37-150 μm, which are called as slimes. these slimes are generally discarded and dumped in a large tailing pond, which eventually stuck large amount of land and causes environmental pollution apart from waste of many million tons of iron ore. if these slimes can be converted into high-grade iron ore by beneficiation or palletization method, then it would be an worthy approach towards supply of the high-grade iron ore and an ideal example of “waste to wealth” approach. various solid-liquid separation techniques (not limited to magnetic separation, electrowinning, flotation, gravitational concentration, selective flocculation and so on) have been implemented by researchers for the beneficiation of iron ore. out of which, selective flocculation is the mostly used technique for this purpose. selective flocculation is a process by which the targeted fine particles can be flocculated using polymeric reagents, namely selective flocculant, and then these aggregates are separated from the other fine particles, which remains in the suspension. natural polysaccharides such as starch, dextrin are usually used as selective flocculants for the beneficiation of iron ore and it is the common practice in almost all industries. the above-mentioned polysaccharides have a natural selectivity towards iron particles. however, the effectivity as well as settling rate are poor. therefore, it is of high demand from the industry as well as academia point of view to develop some novel reagents that will not only enhance the settling rate but also will increase the % recovery of high-grade iron ore from the mixture of inorganic gangues. considering the importance as well as the urgency of iron ore beneficiation, for the first time, a new biopolymeric reagent has been developed using dextrin as the staring material, further modification by methacrylation, followed by incorporation of two synthetic polymers via free radical polymerization technique. this is a simple and single step reaction (scheme 1), and the developed reagent supersedes the efficacy in all aspects in compared to the existing reagents (starch as well as commercial flocculant, which are individually or in proportion used by the industries at present). the synthesized reagent not only demonstrates its efficacy in lab scale (refer to the video 1), but also reveals its excellent efficiency in pilot scale trial (attach: figures 1-4), considering the overall processing time reduced to 15 times (figure 5). it is therefore believed that the synthesized flocculant (patent filed: indian patent application no: 202331006300, 2023) is economically viable, environmental friendly and up scalable.