India Opened Zircon to Private Mining in 2023. Morbi Still Imports It.

Everyone in the tile trade is talking about gas. The Morbi shutdown, the propane spike, the Hormuz disruption — it has dominated every conversation in the industry for the better part of a year. Almost nobody is talking about the second imported input sitting quietly inside every glazed tile that leaves a Morbi kiln.

Zircon — zirconium silicate — is the opacifier. It is the material that makes a white tile white, that stops the darker body of the tile showing through the glaze, that gives a printed design a clean bright base to sit on. Milled into zircon flour or micronised zirconium silicate, it enters the glaze at grams per square metre — a small physical quantity, but at dollar prices, and priced in a global market that India does not control. And the tile industry is not a minor customer in that market. It is the market. The US Geological Survey names ceramics as the leading end use for zircon, and independent industry data puts ceramics above 50 percent of total zircon sand consumption worldwide.

Here is the part that should make anyone in the Indian tile industry pause. India has world-class zircon deposits. It changed its own law in 2023 to allow private companies to mine them. And three years later, Morbi still buys its zircon from Australia.

What It Is and Why There Is No Substitute

Zircon is a mineral sand. It is mined mostly as a co-product — extracted alongside the titanium minerals ilmenite and rutile from the same heavy mineral sand deposits. You do not generally mine for zircon alone; you mine a heavy mineral sand and separate zircon out as one of several valuable fractions.

Its role as an opacifier is difficult to replace economically. Alternatives exist and are known to every glaze chemist: tin oxide, zinc oxide, antimony-based systems, mixed-phase calcines, and tin-zircon blends can all deliver opacity. None of them match zircon on the specific metric that matters most in a cost-sensitive industry — cost-to-whiteness. This is why, when zircon prices spike, manufacturers deploy substitution strategies to manage the cost rather than to eliminate zircon from the formulation. Substitution in this industry is a price-management tool, not a supply-replacement solution. Zircon remains the reference material.

The move up the value chain makes the zircon dependency more acute, not less. Digital inkjet decoration — the printing technology that gives modern GVT and PGVT their design realism — demands finer, more tightly specified opacifiers that disperse cleanly and avoid clogging or wearing print heads. As Indian manufacturers premiumise their output, as Orient Bell is doing with its ceramic-to-GVT conversion that we covered in the Orient Bell Q1 FY27 piece, the opacifier specification gets tighter and the product gets more dependent on high-quality, consistent zircon input — not less. Premiumisation and import dependency move in the same direction.

A Short Supplier List and a Structural Vulnerability

The global zircon supply is concentrated in a small number of producers, dominated by Australia and South Africa. The names that matter are few: Iluka Resources in Australia, Rio Tinto’s Richards Bay Minerals and Tronox in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal, Kenmare Resources in Mozambique, Eramet’s TiZir operation, and PYX Resources in Indonesia. That is close to the entire list of globally significant primary suppliers for a material that goes into the majority of the world’s glazed tiles.

Pricing published in February 2026 put standard zircon sand at around USD 1,490 to 1,520 per tonne on a CIF China port basis, in a global zircon sand market worth roughly USD 3 billion in 2026. Two qualifications matter before that figure is used for anything. It is a benchmark for standard-grade sand delivered into China, which is the reference market rather than the Indian one — Indian landed cost will differ on freight, duty and rupee movement. And zircon is not a single commodity: premium grades, standard grades and lower-specification concentrates price separately, sometimes by wide margins, and the ceramic-grade material a glaze producer buys is not the same line item as bulk sand. The number is useful as an order of magnitude and as a direction of travel. It is not a quotation.

The structural vulnerability worth understanding is more subtle than price. Iluka Resources, the largest single Western producer, has been pivoting strategically toward rare earths, anchored by its Eneabba refinery project in Western Australia. As that pivot advances, zircon increasingly becomes a by-product of a business whose primary strategic focus is elsewhere. When the largest supplier of your critical input treats that input as a secondary revenue line, the volume of supply becomes partly a function of somebody else’s rare-earth economics rather than a function of tile demand.

That is a fundamentally different kind of exposure from gas. Natural gas has a published price that can be hedged, tracked, and planned around. Zircon supply volume is, to a meaningful degree, a decision made in a boardroom in Perth about how much heavy mineral sand to process and in what product mix. It is an exposure that most Indian tile manufacturers have never quantified, because zircon arrives quietly in bags and appears as an unremarkable line on a glaze invoice.

The India Paradox

Here is what makes the Indian position genuinely paradoxical. India does not lack zircon. The beach sand deposits along the coasts of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh are among the world’s finest heavy mineral sand resources — India holds around 13 percent of global beach sand mineral reserves, the third-largest endowment of any country, and the Indian Bureau of Mines puts the zircon resource alone at 36.56 million tonnes. Andhra Pradesh accounts for around 25 percent of the national total. The zircon is physically present, in commercial quantities, on Indian soil.

The complication is monazite. Monazite is a rare-earth phosphate mineral that contains thorium — and thorium is the long-term fuel for India’s third-stage nuclear power programme, the strategic vision laid down by Homi Bhabha at the founding of the country’s atomic energy establishment. Monazite occurs in the same beach sands as zircon, ilmenite, rutile, garnet, and sillimanite. You cannot separate the policy treatment of zircon from the policy treatment of the sand it lives in, because they come out of the ground together.

The policy timeline is worth setting out precisely, because the gap between what the law appears to say and what actually happens at the kiln lives entirely inside it.

In 2006, notification S.O. 61(E) deleted zircon from the prescribed substances list under atomic energy regulation, subject to conditions. In 2016, however, beach sand minerals including zircon were brought into the atomic minerals category through the First Schedule of the MMDR Act. In 2018, exports of beach sand minerals — zircon included, under HSN 2615 — were canalised exclusively through the state-owned Indian Rare Earths Limited, removing private companies from the export chain.

On 20 February 2019, notification G.S.R. 134(E) changed the threshold value for monazite in beach sand minerals from 0.75 percent to zero. In practical effect, because trace monazite is present across most Indian beach sand deposits, this brought virtually all beach sand mining under atomic minerals rules and prohibited private companies from mining it. The stated purpose was to ensure complete government control over monazite and, by extension, the zircon that occurs alongside it.

Then in 2023, the MMDR Amendment Act removed zirconium-bearing minerals — along with lithium, beryllium, titanium, niobium, and tantalum — from the list of atomic minerals reserved for public sector mining. On the face of it, this opened zircon to private and foreign investment. The government’s stated rationale was that these minerals are technology and energy critical, that India was import-dependent because existing legal provisions had suppressed domestic exploration, and that private participation was needed to build supply.

But the beach sand where India’s zircon actually sits still contains monazite, and monazite remains firmly within atomic energy regulation. This is the crux of the paradox: zircon as a mineral category was declassified, but the monazite-bearing sand it co-occurs in was not — and the constraints created by the 2019 threshold change continue to shape what can actually be mined. The tension between these two positions is exactly what is now being fought over politically.

In mid-2026, E.A.S. Sarma, a former Secretary to the Government of India, wrote to the Prime Minister urging revocation of the 2023 amendment as it applies to beach sand mining. His argument is that allowing private mining of monazite-rich sands threatens India’s thorium resources and, with them, the long-term self-reliance of the country’s nuclear programme — a departure, he argues, from the Bhabha-Nehru doctrine of conserving monazite exclusively for state use. This is not a fringe intervention. The thorium-conservation argument has persistent, serious support, and it keeps the entire framework politically live.

The number that captures the commercial cost of this policy tangle: peer-reviewed critical minerals analysis found that the 2019 notification resulted in 36 to 57 percent of India’s titanium and zircon production capacities being declared legally inaccessible. More than a third — potentially more than half — of the country’s own capacity in these minerals was placed out of reach.

The international comparison makes the point land. Australia places no restrictions on zircon exports unless the material carries more than 500 parts per million of combined uranium and thorium oxide — a genuinely radioactive threshold, not a trace one. Vietnam permits the export of all mineral sands except monazite itself. Industry representations note that essentially nowhere else in the world classifies ordinary mineral sands the way India has.

And the final irony, worth stating plainly: the import of zirconium ores into India under ITC(HS) 26151000 is freely allowed. There is no import restriction on zircon. The constraint India has placed is entirely on its own domestic production. Morbi can buy all the Australian zircon it wants. What it cannot easily do is buy Indian zircon, because Indian zircon is tangled in the policy framework around the thorium in the sand next to it.

Why Permission Has Not Become Supply

Three years after the law changed to open zircon to private mining, Morbi still imports. Before explaining why, it is worth being precise about what the 2023 amendment did and did not do. It removed a legal prohibition. It did not create a mine, a separation plant, or a tonne of tile-grade zircon. Permission and production are different things, and the distance between them is where this story sits.

The auction record is the clearest available evidence of that distance. The MMDR Amendment Act 2023 empowered the central government to auction mining leases and composite licences for 24 critical and strategic minerals, and the Ministry of Mines has run the programme steadily since. Across the first seven tranches, 88 critical and strategic mineral blocks were offered and 56 were successfully auctioned. In FY 2025-26 the ministry auctioned 212 mineral blocks in total, the highest in any year since the auction regime began, of which 22 were critical and strategic.

The eighth tranche, launched on 15 July 2026, offered 20 blocks across nine states. The mineral portfolio was listed as molybdenum, graphite, glauconite, rare earth elements, vanadium, gallium, titanium, tungsten, phosphorite, potash, lithium, caesium and rubidium. Titanium is on that list. Zircon is not.

That absence is not conclusive on its own — a single tranche is not the whole programme, and the Indian Bureau of Mines and the Ministry of Mines remain the authoritative sources for what has actually been granted. But it is indicative. Three years and eight auction rounds into a programme explicitly designed to build domestic supply of minerals where India is import-dependent, zircon has not visibly featured. For an industry that is the mineral’s largest domestic consumer, that is worth noticing.

Beyond the auction record, three structural reasons explain why permission has not translated into supply.

The first reason is scale. IREL’s reported zircon production has historically run in the region of 10,800 tonnes a year. Against an Indian tile industry producing well over a billion square metres annually — each square metre of glazed tile carrying its grams of opacifier — that domestic production is not a supply base. It is a rounding error. Even if every gram IREL produces went to the tile industry, it would cover a small fraction of demand.
The second reason is lead time. Mineral projects do not respond to legal changes on the timescale of quarters. Auctions of mineral blocks, the grant of leases, environmental clearances, plant construction, and the building of mineral separation capacity together take years. A law passed in 2023 does not produce separated, milled, tile-grade zircon in 2026. The physical supply chain has its own clock, and it is slow.
The third reason is political risk. The mid-2026 letter to the Prime Minister is not an isolated act — it reflects a durable strand of policy thinking that has resisted the opening of beach sand mining for decades on national-security grounds. An investor weighing a beach sand project has to weigh the genuine possibility that the framework is reversed or re-restricted before their investment matures. That uncertainty raises the cost of capital for exactly the projects that would build domestic zircon supply.

What India does have is processing. Zirconium silicate milling plants are being actively promoted in India as viable investments — at capacities around 15,000 metric tonnes with gross margins in the 24 to 32 percent range. So India mills zircon into the fine flour and micronised silicate that glaze production requires. It simply mills imported sand. The value-addition step exists domestically; the raw material feeding it comes from Western Australia and KwaZulu-Natal.

The Exposure Most Plants Have Never Quantified

Gas commands attention because it is impossible to ignore. It has a published tariff, it moved violently in both directions this year, and when supply was cut the kilns went cold. Zircon commands no attention at all, for the opposite reason. It arrives in bags, it is consumed in grams, and on a monthly cost statement it sits below the lines that get discussed. The exposure is real, but it has never been sized in most Indian plants.

Three characteristics make it worth sizing.

Opacifier intensity varies sharply across a product portfolio. Loading is highest where the requirement to mask the underlying body is greatest — white and light-coloured surfaces carry more zircon than dark ones, and heavily opacified premium ranges carry more than plain ceramic wall tile. This makes zircon exposure a function of product mix, not of production volume. A plant running a portfolio weighted toward premium whites and lights carries materially more dollar-denominated input risk per square metre than a plant weighted toward dark ceramic — and that difference does not show up anywhere in a headline cost-per-square-metre figure.

Premiumisation increases the exposure rather than diluting it. This is the point that deserves attention at a planning level. Every conversion from ceramic to GVT, every move toward finer digital decoration, every step up in surface quality raises both the quantity and the specification of opacifier required. Kajaria has converted a ceramic line at Gailpur to GVT production. Orient Bell has announced conversion of a million square metres of ceramic capacity to GVT. The strategic direction of the entire organised segment is toward products that consume more imported zircon per square metre than the products they replace. The industry is deliberately increasing an import dependency it has not measured.

The supply chain is longer and narrower than most manufacturers have mapped. A tile plant buys frit and glaze from a glaze house. The glaze house buys micronised zirconium silicate from a miller. The miller buys sand from one of a short list of global producers — the largest of whom is now treating zircon as a by-product of a rare earths business. That is three links, each of which may be single-sourced, ending in a supply decision made in Western Australia for reasons that have nothing to do with tile demand. Concentration risk of that shape is normally mapped and mitigated. In this case it is rarely mapped at all, because the input looks small at the point where the invoice arrives.

None of this argues for panic, and there is no evidence of a zircon supply disruption in progress. It argues for measurement. A plant that knows its opacifier consumption per square metre by product family, its rupee exposure at current parity, and the number of independent suppliers standing between it and a mine, is a plant that can make a decision if the position changes. A plant that does not know those three things will find out what its exposure was only after it has moved.

What It Means for the Trade

The Indian tile industry carries two import dependencies on its cost structure, not one. Gas is visible, dramatic, and has a published price that everyone tracks. Zircon arrives in bags, sits quietly in the glaze department, and appears as an unremarkable line on a supplier invoice. Both are dollar-denominated. Both are set in markets outside Indian control. Only one of them is being discussed.

And there is a meaningful difference between the two. The gas crisis was, at its root, geopolitics — the Strait of Hormuz, the West Asia conflict, forces genuinely outside any Indian policymaker’s control, as we documented in the Morbi gas crisis coverage. The zircon position is different. It is substantially the product of Indian domestic policy — a self-imposed constraint on domestic supply of a critical input, with a legislative path to relief already partially open through the 2023 amendment, even as that path remains contested.

There is a striking symmetry with the trade-policy story we examined in the US countervailing duty piece. That case turned on the Gujarat government supplying gas to tile manufacturers below market rates — a subsidy flowing into the industry. Meanwhile, Indian policy has held back the domestic supply of another critical input entirely. One subsidy flowing in on gas, one self-imposed constraint holding back zircon. The two sit oddly together in any honest account of how India supports, and simultaneously handicaps, its own tile sector.

For manufacturers, the strategic implication is worth stating clearly. If beach sand projects ever reach genuine production scale, a domestic zircon supply chain would permanently reduce the dollar exposure sitting inside every glaze formulation. That is a structural cost advantage and a supply-security benefit that the industry would hold for decades. It is also a lobbying position — a case for a carefully regulated framework that separates tile-grade zircon supply from the legitimate thorium-conservation concern around monazite — that the tile industry has not made loudly or coherently. The thorium argument deserves to be taken seriously; it is a genuine national-security question, not a bureaucratic obstacle. But the question of whether India can build a domestic zircon supply for its largest manufacturing use of the mineral, without compromising thorium conservation, is a policy problem worth the industry’s attention.

The white in an Indian tile starts, for now, in Western Australia. Whether it has to is a question of Indian policy — and the industry that depends on it most has barely entered the conversation.