The night the glow faded: Inside the unprecedented silence of Morbi

₹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.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