Mumbai, March 22 -- 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 pr...