Diamond sector badly hit
More than 2 million people are employed in diamond polishing and cutting units in Surat, Ahmedabad and Rajkot cities in Gujarat — and many have already suffered salary cuts in recent years, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“The pandemic led to economic slowdown affecting the international markets in Hong Kong and China,” Ramesh Zilriya, the president of Gujarat’s Diamond Workers Union, told Al Jazeera. The “Western ban on rough diamond imports from Russia due to the Russia-Ukraine war and the G7 ban on Russia also affected our business”, he added.
Russia has historically been a major source of raw diamonds.
Zilriya claimed that 80 diamond workers have died by suicide over the past two years because of this economic crisis.
“The situation in the international market led to the wages of the workers getting halved to approximately 15,000-17,000 rupees ($194) per month, which made survival difficult in the face of rising inflation,” he said.
Once the Trump tariffs fully kick in, Zilriya fears that up to 200,000 people in Gujarat may lose their livelihoods.
Already, more than 120,000 former diamond sector workers have applied for benefits. A 13,500-rupee ($154) allowance per child, to support their families, was promised in May by the state government to those who have lost jobs due to the tumult in the sector in recent years.
But the tariffs, pandemic and war are not alone to blame for the crisis: Lab-grown diamonds are also slowly eating into the market of their natural counterparts.
“Unlike natural [diamonds], the lab-grown diamonds are not mined but manufactured in specialised laboratories and priced at just 10 percent of the natural ones. It is difficult even for a seasoned jeweller to identify the natural and lab
