Mumbai: On most nights, Morbi glows.
The light comes from hundreds of ceramic kilns firing through the darkness, turning clay into tiles that travel across India and into markets as far as the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The heat is relentless, the rhythm uninterrupted. Kilns, once started, do not stop. That is both their power and their peril: a kiln mid-fire cannot simply be switched off without damaging the product inside and the machinery itself. The technology demands constancy.
Now, the kilns have stopped.
Across the cluster, chimneys stand silent. Factory gates are half-shut. Trucks wait in long, unmoving lines at the edges of industrial estates. Inside the factories, there are no workers manning production lines. They haven’t been formally laid off as yet and are now either in their dormitories or back home in their native villages waiting for the signal to return back to work.
At the offices of the Morbi Ceramic Manufacturers Association, the past several weeks have been marked by a quiet, grinding urgency. On 17 March, more than 200 manufacturers gathered and ratified a vote to keep factories shut until 15 April. By that point, nearly 90% of units had already halted production — many for over two weeks — unable to secure adequate gas supplies. A day after the meeting, the manufacturers returned. Not to reopen, but to submit estimates of how much fuel they would need when supply eventually resumed. It is a rare and revealing sight: an industry planning for production in the total absence of fuel.
That’s because the ongoing Iran conflict has upended one of the world’s most critical energy arteries, with cascading effects now reaching India’s industrial heartlands. At the centre of the disruption is the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime chokepoint through which roughly 20% of global oil and significant liquefied natural gas (LNG) volumes typically pass. Since late February, military strikes and shipping risks have effectively choked traffic, with tanker movement dropping sharply and insurers pulling cover, forcing vessels onto longer, costlier routes around Africa.
For India, the fallout has been immediate and severe. Between 55% and 65% of its LNG imports transit this route, with Qatar alone accounting for a large share—supplies that are now either disrupted or delayed. Damage to Qatari gas infrastructure and force majeure declarations have further tightened availability, while shipping delays have stranded cargoes and pushed up freight costs.
With limited alternatives and higher transit times from distant suppliers like the US or Australia, gas has become both scarce and expensive. The Indian government has prioritized household consumption, squeezing industrial users. The result is a cascading supply shock—one that has begun to idle factories, with Morbi’s gas-dependent ceramic units among the earliest and hardest hit.
A town that remade itself
To understand the weight of the present crisis, one must first understand how far Morbi has travelled. The town sits in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, roughly 60km from Rajkot. Its association with ceramics stretches back generations. Wall clocks and pottery were once its calling cards. The transformation into a global tile manufacturing hub is a story driven by the convergence of natural gas availability, abundant silica and feldspar deposits, proximity to Mundra port, and a fiercely entrepreneurial business culture rooted in the Patel community.
The inflection point came in the mid-2000s, when the Gujarat government’s push to develop gas infrastructure gave smaller manufacturers access to piped natural gas for the first time. Kilns converted from coal and wood; temperatures could be held more precisely, yields improved and tile quality moved upmarket. Italian equipment manufacturers began setting up shop in Morbi, and by the early 2010s, glazing technology, digital printing and large-format capabilities were being reverse-engineered locally. The workforce swelled as migrants arrived from Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Rajasthan.
Today, Morbi accounts for roughly 70% of India’s ceramic tile output. The cluster houses more than 700 manufacturing units, ranging from small floor-tile workshops to large integrated plants capable of producing vitrified slabs used in premium commercial buildings. According to Manoj Arvadiya, president of the Morbi Ceramic Manufacturers Association, the cluster generates roughly ₹60,000 crore in revenue, or closer to ₹80,000 crore when the broader Indian ceramic industry is counted. India is the world’s second-largest tile manufacturer, behind China, and Morbi is the engine of that position.
The industry’s growth has tracked India’s real estate expansion with unusual fidelity. As K.K. Patel, president of the Morbi Ceramic Trading Association, puts it: “There are several changes taking place in the Indian market and the ceramic industry in India is still less than $10 billion and has a long way to go. Its small size is because the business was largely a small-scale business until 15 years ago.”
On the export side, Morbi’s achievement is arguably more striking. According to the United Nations Comtrade database, Indian ceramic exports amount to roughly $2.71 billion, outside the country’s top 20 export categories, but notable for a different reason: this is one of the few Indian industries that has gone toe-to-toe with Chinese manufacturers and held its ground.
“India was the biggest exporter to the Middle East until three years ago but has lost out as Chinese companies set up huge factories there. Yet, Indian exports haven’t fallen as we have been able to find alternative markets in Western Europe and Africa,” Narendra Patel, a partner at Veritas Granito Llp, says.
Chinese groups such as Wangkang built manufacturing bases in West Asia specifically to strip away Morbi’s freight advantage in those markets—and Morbi adapted rather than retreat.
The vulnerability
Ceramic manufacturing is, at its core, a thermal process. Kaolin, feldspar, silica (sand-based non-metallic industrial minerals that are the primary raw materials in ceramic and glass making) and colouring agents are shaped into green tiles and then fired at temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius in tunnel kilns that can stretch 200m in length. The firing vitrifies the material, giving it the hardness and impermeability that makes it useful in kitchens, bathrooms and public spaces. There is no shortcut. Heat is the product.
Morbi’s dependence on imported fuel—principally propane and piped natural gas—has long been its weakest structural link. The ongoing geopolitical tensions in West Asia have forced the reckoning the industry had been hoping to defer.
The energy crunch has compounded other cost pressures that were already bearing down on the industry. Tiles require specialised inks, glazes and chemicals, many of which are imported from Italy and Spain. Raw materials, including certain clays and binding agents, are sourced from China. The cost of a container from Chinese supplier Fosun, for instance, has reportedly risen from $700–800 to $2,800 as global shipping rates have surged.
“If on the one hand the shortage of gas has shut down factories, the energy crisis has revealed a different set of problems for the exporters,” Upendra Nagar, president of the Indian Ceramic Export Association, which counts more than 1,000 members, says. “A container load of tiles would normally cost $5,000–6,000 plus shipping. Currently, shipping costs have more than doubled and therefore, even exports of existing stocks are untenable.”
There is also a hard political economy at work, and the industry itself does not flinch from acknowledging it. Nilesh Jetpariya, chairman of Capexcil’s ceramic panel, frames it plainly: “Just as much as Morbi is an important export industry for India, local manufacturers are also aware that they consume critical resources that can be prioritised for more important purposes by the administration. A month of gas supply to Morbi is equal to the domestic gas consumed by the entire 65 million Gujarat population.”
So, it is difficult to argue for the allocation of more gas to the industry.
Capexcil is an export promotion council, set up by the ministry of commerce.
The political response has been measured. Gujarat chief minister Bhupendra Patel visited Morbi in late March and acknowledged the industry’s distress, assuring manufacturers that the state government was in discussions with the Centre and gas suppliers to restore supplies. “The Gujarat government is committed to supporting our industries and we are working to resolve the gas supply issue as a priority,” he said in Gandhinagar on 13 March, though he stopped short of announcing specific allocations or a firm timeline.
Separately, the ministry of petroleum and natural gas indicated that domestic supply constraints were being reviewed, but offered no immediate relief package.
Beyond the factory gate
What is striking about Morbi’s shutdown is not just its scale, but its coordination. Rather than a ragged, fragmented series of individual closures, the industry has organized a collective pause. The association has brought hundreds of manufacturers—many of them family-run operations—into a single, aligned response. This kind of industry-wide discipline is unusual anywhere in the world, and speaks to the dense social and commercial networks that have developed within the cluster over decades.
But the human cost extends well beyond the factories themselves. Morbi’s economy reaches outward into a thick web of transport, logistics, retail and ancillary services all calibrated to the rhythm of the kilns. When the kilns go cold, the entire ecosystem stills.
Prabhat Yadav, president of the Morbi Truck Transport Association, which represents over 1,000 truck and logistics company owners, describes the disruption in terms that go beyond the immediate stoppage. “Most of our truck drivers are from UP (Uttar Pradesh) and Orissa and since the crisis started, many of them have gone home,” he says. “Unlike employees in companies, these drivers earn only when they drive. Even though there has been an announcement that gas supplies will start by 15 April, these drivers will return only when they are sure the factories are functioning normally.”
The implication is a restart problem that could outlast the fuel crisis itself. Even after gas flows again, factories will need workers, drivers, loaders and packers. The informal networks that supply them are now scattered across other states. Remobilizing them will take time—and money. Inside factories, manufacturers are trying to retain their core workforce by providing accommodation and meals. But every additional week stretches that calculus closer to its limit.
The third upheaval
Morbi has a memory of crisis. K.K. Patel of the Morbi Ceramic Trading Association, who has watched the industry through three major upheavals, draws the distinctions carefully.
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, the Indian tile industry did not suffer much as it was largely a domestic industry which was just beginning to emerge. The demand held and the industry’s low installed capacity cushioned it from the global crisis.
The next crisis came with the covid-19 pandemic, when both the tile makers and the user industry shut. “There was pent-up demand when businesses opened up after the lockdown and the construction boom that followed saw organized players becoming big,” Patel says.
Now, the disruption is structurally different, and in some ways more awkward. The user industry is functioning normally, unlike during the pandemic. Builders are buying tiles; they are simply buying them from existing inventory rather than new production. The pain is concentrated entirely on the manufacturer.
Patel is measured about what the outcome depends on: “What the current crisis does for the manufacturers will depend on how long the lack of gas continues. If it is just one month, and factories resume in April, the manufacturers will be able to absorb the losses over the next year. But if the disruption prolongs beyond two months, we will witness really tough times.”
That uncertainty—not the shutdown itself, but its duration—is what the industry is living with. A month is survivable. Two months begins to hollow out cash reserves, strain supplier relationships, and push smaller manufacturers toward decisions they cannot reverse.
Some in the industry are already using the crisis as an argument for deeper structural change. Jitendra Aghara, chairman and managing director of Simpolo Tiles, one of Morbi’s largest manufacturers, sees energy transition as both necessary and, on a longer horizon, inevitable.
“Long term, tile manufacturers have to look beyond gas-based kilns to secure production. There are already hybrid kilns available which can work on hydrogen and this is a good alternative for us,” he says. “Even before the current gas crisis, we had plans to invest in hybrid kilns as there are already plans for hydrogen production by players like Reliance in Gujarat and also, in the future, export markets may insist on tiles made from greener sources.”
European buyers are increasingly scrutinising the carbon footprint of imported goods. Tiles made in fossil-fuel-fired kilns face a medium-term risk of being taxed out of competitiveness, or simply excluded by procurement policies that prioritise low-carbon supply chains. The current crisis, in this reading, is not only a supply shock but an accelerant—it could force conversations about energy transition that the industry might otherwise have deferred for another decade.
There is a harder structural question lurking beneath the energy debate, one that Manish Patel, owner of online tile trading platform morbitilehub.com, raises without equivocation. “These kinds of shocks will have lasting changes among local manufacturers. Slowly, we will see larger companies and non-Morbi players like Kajaria (Delhi) become the more dominant players. They have deeper pockets to survive these situations,” he says.
Kajaria did not respond to questions from Mint till press time.
It is an uncomfortable prospect for a cluster built on the vitality of its small and mid-sized family units.
The town was built on fire. In its absence, the question Morbi must now answer is not just how to restart but whether, in restarting, it can build something more durable than what existed before.