Quarry Machinery in India: Models, Tenders, Companies and News

Where is stone quarrying concentrated in India?

Building stone is a minor mineral under section 3 of the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Act, 1957, which means quarry leases are granted by state governments under their own minor mineral concession rules rather than by the centre. One consequence shows up straight away in the data: producers report their output to the state, not to the Indian Bureau of Mines, so national quarry figures are patchy by design. The Bureau says as much in its own granite review.

What is recorded is where the stone sits. Taking granite as the best documented case, the Indian Bureau of Mines put national resources at 46,320 million cubic metres as on 1 April 2015, and split them between Karnataka and Rajasthan at about 20% each, followed by Jharkhand at 19%, Gujarat at 18%, Andhra Pradesh at 5% and Madhya Pradesh and Odisha at 4% each. Those states hold 90% of the total between them.

Resources and working quarries are not the same thing, and the Bureau lists the producing states separately: granite in raw and processed form comes mainly from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. The same review notes that the dimension stone industry employs over a million people and matters most to the economies of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Rajasthan (Indian Minerals Yearbook 2022, granite review, released March 2024).

Aggregate quarries follow a different rule entirely. Crushed stone is too heavy to travel far before haulage costs more than the stone, so aggregate quarries cluster around whatever is being built. Every large city and every highway package has a ring of them within a short haul, which is why a quarry machine owner’s market is local in a way a highway contractor’s is not.

Who are the main quarry companies in India?

Most quarrying in India is done by small operators working one lease, which is why national figures are hard to come by. The companies with a name outside their own district tend to be dimension stone producers or state mineral undertakings. The list is alphabetical, not a ranking, and each line describes what the company itself says it quarries.

The list is short on purpose. It carries only companies whose own published material states what they quarry, and it leaves out the thousands of single lease operators who between them raise most of India’s stone.