A facile solution combustion synthesis has been adopted to synthesize ZrO2/CuO nanocomposite oxides (NCO's) by utilizing Oxalyl dihydrazide (ODH) as fuel. The X-ray diffraction patterns and TEM analysis reveals the presence of cubic ZrO2 and CuO in ZrO2/CuO NCO's. The NCO's synthesized by simple, fast, highly sensitive and low-cost method is found to be an alternate to traditional luminescent powders for the detection and enhancement of finger marks in a broad range of surfaces. The photoluminescence analysis indicates that the present NCO is an effective blue component in display applications. The synthesized ZrO2/CuO (2:1) composite exhibited excellent photocatalytic activity towards the degradation of various dyes under Sunlight. In particular, Indigo carmine dye was chosen to explore the photocatalytic performance of prepared NCO's under Sunlight illumination. It was found that ZrO2: CuO (2:1) NCO showed enhanced photocatalytic activity of 97% which was found to be 3.3 times 2.4 times and 1.5 times higher than that of pure ZrO2, CuO and commercial P25. This can be mainly attributed to the balance between the parameters, band gap, nature of morphology, crystallite size, defects and surface area which causes a slow electron-hole pair recombination rate with fast electron transfer ability. It opens new window to use this simple method to synthesize multifunctional character ZrO2-based composite materials in the area of photocatalysis particularly waste water treatment, display applications as well as a labeling agent to enhance latent fingerprints. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.