“Diamond Empowerment” is a series of articles, each one a case study, providing an objective overview of the contribution – both realized and still only potential – that the diamond industry makes to sustainable development in the countries where it is present.
The eighth article in the series looks at India, which until the 18th century was considered the world’s only source of rough diamonds. Today, with its mines are largely depleted, the country is the predominant polished diamond manufacturer globally, and also a major trading center and marketplace.
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
Photo by X L on Unsplash.com
Most probably the most important developments to impact the growth of the Indian diamond industry took place in Yakutia in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, and in Western Australia in the 1970s. What made them so significant is that they added into the world’s rough diamond pipeline massive quantities of melee, which required the low-cost manufacturing capacity of the Indian industry to achieve full economic potential.
MARCH 19, 2026
There is no country with diamonds more firmly a part of the national DNA than India. Thousands of years before the world knew of deposits in Southern Africa, Western Australia, Brazil, Siberia and Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Indian sub-continent was considered to be the sole source of the world’s most sought-after gemstone.
In fact, there are reliable records of an organized diamond industry already operating in the countryside surrounding the Krishna and Penna rivers 2,500 years ago. Located on the Deccan Plateau in what today are the modern Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, this was the Golconda region, where scores of women and men sifted daily through the gravel and silt of riverbanks in search of the precious gemstone.
In ancient Sanskrit texts, diamonds were referred to as Vajra, meaning “thunderbolt” or “indestructible.” Believed to have been created when lightning struck rock, the finest stones were talismans reserved for royalty, which were thought to grant invincibility in battle and offer protection against natural forces.
In the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, economics and military strategy, the 4th Century BCE Indian philosopher Kautilya listed diamonds as a critical source of state revenue. In it, he described a sophisticated classification system based on their origin, listing six qualities, two of which were clarity and symmetry.
Women sifting gravel in the Golconda diamond fields. An illustration from “A Nutshell of Knowledge Concerning the Mine,” by Isaac Taylor, circa 1830. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The world’s most famous diamond mines and marketplace
Golconda was not a single mine. Named after a fortified city five kilometers west of what today is Hyderabad, it actually was a network of up to 38 alluvial deposits spread along the Krishna and Godavari river basins. The most famous was at Kollur. Discovered around 1560, by the mid-17th Century its workforce was said to number 60,000 people.
Most of the diamonds mined in the areas were brough to Golconda Fort, where they were weighed, taxed and sold.
Among the most famous stones that were traded at the fort was the rough that produced the Koh-i-Noor, which today is part of the British Crown Jewels; the deep blue Hope Diamond, now part of the Smithsonian collection in Washington, D.C.; the Regent, once was considered the most perfectly cut large diamond, which can be seen today in the Louvre in Paris; and the fancy pink Darya-i-Noor, which became part of the Iranian Crown Jewels.
By medieval times, the fortress of Golconda served as the world’s most famous diamond market, attracting merchants from Persia, Arabia, and eventually Europe. Its influence peaked during the Mughal period, from the 16th through the 19th centuries, when emperors viewed jewelry not just as symbols of wealth, but as a visual representation of their “God-given” right to rule. Their Peacock Throne was encrusted with hundreds of diamonds, including the Koh-i-Noor.
The individual most credited with spreading word of India’s diamond legacy to Europe was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. A 17th-century French gem merchant, he made six trips to Persia and India between 1632 and 1668, documenting his experiences in a travelogue called Les Six Voyages. He also purchased the 116-carat blue stone that he sold to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was later renamed the Hope Diamond.
A painting (circa 1841) of Maharaja Sher Singh wearing the Koh-i-Noor diamond, located on his right bicep emplaced within an armlet, by August Schoefft. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
An industry reborn
But by the 18th Century, millennia of intensive surface mining had exhausted the Indian subcontinent’s riverbeds. So, when gold miners in Brazil stumbled upon alluvial diamond deposits in the 1720s, the global monopoly on diamond production shifted westward.
By 1900, after the discovery of massive diamond deposits in South Africa, India’s role as a source of diamonds was a footnote of history. There remained in the country a modest cutting industry, staffed by skilled artisans whose craft had been handed down from generation to generation. But it served only the domestic and regional markets, while most high-value cutting was concentrated in the European centers of Antwerp and Amsterdam.
The small community of cutters was resilient, however, and resided primarily in Palanpur and Surat, which also was the ancestral home to the Jain community, which later would dominate the Indian diamond trade. Cutting was artisanal, using manually operated lathes and wheels.
At the same time Bombay developed as the principal trading hub. The city was western India’s principal deep‑water port and its commercial gateway. Under British rule it became the region’s maritime and customs center. It was only renamed Mumbai in 1995.
Bombay already hosted long‑established trading communities, specializing in finance, brokering, and long‑distance commerce. They organized capital, acted as intermediaries with Antwerp and London, and linked local cutters to global buyers. Their credit and trust networks were crucial for the risk‑heavy diamond trade.
Surat and the smaller Gujarati centers north of Bombay developed labor‑intensive polishing clusters, with cheap but skilled labor, artisan communities and workshop economies. Many of their workers were also subsistence farmers, who would leave their land to work in rudimentary diamond workshops depending on the season and demand.
Good rail and road links connected Maharashtra, where Bombay was located, with the cutting centers in Gujarat, enabling the fast movement of rough to cutters, and then polished stones back the traders for export or retail. Many Gujarati entrepreneurs maintained headquarters or principal offices in Bombay, while operating workshops in Surat and the surrounding areas.
Illustrations of early Indian diamond cuts, from the Les Six Voyages travelogue by Jean Baptiste Tavernier. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The Indian diamond sector spreads its wings
But the expansion of the Indian cutting and trading center began during the years that followed World War II. It was not a foregone conclusion, for this was a time during which De Beers was committed to enabling Antwerp to regain its predominance in the industry, following the devastation of the Nazi occupation of the Belgian city between May 1940 and September 1944. However, it also was the period when India gained independence from Britain in 1947, and its new government was faced with the urgent task of developing an independent and growth-oriented economy.
The Indian companies, most of which were family owned, were already developing a reputation for being able to cost effectively handle very small and low-value stones, which otherwise would have been rejected as being unsuitable for jewelry. But they were objectively challenged by the De Beers sightholder system, which was channeling rough supply mainly to Antwerp and New York, and later to the new production center in Israel.
To remedy the situation, Bombay-headquartered companies began dispatching representatives, usually family members, to establish offices abroad, most often in Antwerp, but also in New York and other production and trading centers. A primary goal was to establish reliable sources of rough supply, but also to provide traders in those centers access to the growing range of goods being produced in India, where the cost of labor was a mere fraction of what was being paid elsewhere.
In time, a good number of those family offices, together with their India-based mother companies, would develop into some of the world’s largest diamond corporations.
The discovery of the Argyle diamond mine in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia in 1979 changed the trajectory of the Indian diamond industry. (Photo credit:Brian W. Schaller on Wikimedia Commons)
Mumbai’s development as trading center
When De Beers overhauled its distribution model to the “Supplier of Choice” system in the early 2000s, Indian companies became even more dominant. By the 2012–2015 contract period, approximately 33 out of 75 global sightholders were Indian entities, and today, they represent more than half of the total sightholder list. Most of them are headquartered in Mumbai, India’s financial hub.
Mumbai’s role in the development of the modern Indian diamond industry was always of fundamental importance. Over a period of a century, the trade journeyed from the narrow and congested lanes of the city’s southern neighborhoods to its northern suburbs, where today is ensconced in what most probably is the world’s largest dedicated diamond business complex.
The Bombay Diamond Merchants’ Association (MDMA) was established in 1906, and through the early 1960s its members operated out of Zaveri Bazaar in the south of the city. Most were from the Palanpuri Jain community, who used the traditional “Angadia” courier networks to move goods to and from the cutting centers in Gujarat.
By the 1970s, the trade had outgrown the crowded jewelry market and moved to the Opera House area, and more specifically the neighborhood surrounding the Roxy and Swastik cinemas.
Thousand of offices were established in the multi-floor Panchratna and Prasad Chambers buildings, but the bulk of the business was conducted by freelance brokers, working outside on the sidewalks. Dressed in white shirts and carrying small paper briefkes, they traded millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds daily.
The narrow streets were perpetually clogged, security a logistical nightmare, and modern grading facilities and infrastructure scare and often non-existent. Thus, the concept of a centralized, world-class bourse facility was floated during the early 1980s, and Bharat Diamond Bourse was officially incorporated.
To facilitate the project, the Government of Maharashtra allocated 20 acres of land in the new Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC), in close proximity to Mumbai’s main international gateway, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, which also was being developed.
For more than a quarter century, starting in the 1970s, the Panchratna building and Prasad Chambers in Mumbai’s Opera House district were the nerve center of the Indian diamond trade. (Photo credit: Udaykumar PR on Wikimedia Commons)
Due to construction delays and the 1990s real estate slump, the project took 18 years to complete, but when the Bharat Diamond Bourse at BKC opened its doors in 2010, it marked a paradigm shift in the Indian diamond trade. The center encompasses 26 tower blocks of nine floors each, housing more than 2,500 offices. The S.G. Jhaveri Trading Hall provides a massive, secure floor for smaller brokers who previously traded on the streets of the Opera House district.
The Bharat Diamond Bourse, comprising 26 tower blocks and more than 2,500 offices, the largest diamond trading complex in the world.
The world’s most prolific diamond cutting center
But there most probably is no place more reflective of the story of the modern Indian diamond industry than Surat, the Gujarati port city in which today well over 90 percent of polished diamonds worldwide are produced each year.
While diamond manufacturing was present in the city already in early 1900s, skilled diamantaires and artisans from traditional cutting regions in Gujarat began migrating in numbers to Surat after Indian independence. Small family-run workshops using manual skills formed the initial base of the business community.
The city’s industry expanded rapidly between 1970 and 1990, as local entrepreneurs organized a dense cluster of workshops, dealers and agents. The city’s advantages—very low labor costs, an abundance of skilled workers, flexible family-business networks and strong trader linkages—attracted increasing volumes of rough diamonds imported from Belgium and Israel, and later from African suppliers as well.
The mechanization of the Surat cutting center was scaled up in the late 1990s and early 2000, often using technologies developed in Israel and Belgium, which ironically had been developed specifically to better compete with growing Indian competition. The use of more precise cutting machines, and the adoption of computerized planning and laser systems enabled huge increases in output and quality.
Today, the workforce in Surat’s diamond sector is estimated to be between 800,000 and 1,000,000 artisans, with its broader jewelry ecosystem roughly equaling 1.5 million people. Interestingly, women make up about 60 percent of the number.
The city processes roughly 1.2 billion carats of rough diamonds annually. To put that in perspective, 14 out of every 15 diamonds set in jewelry globally have likely been through a Surat workshop. The city has also become a dominant producer of lab-grown stones.
On December 17, 2023, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially inaugurated the Surat Diamond Bourse complex. Made up of nine interconnected towers, with space for 4,700 businesses and more than 65,000 workers, when it opened it surpassed the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., as the world’s largest office building. Modi described it as “a symbol of the new India’s capabilities.”
Diamond polishers at one of massive plants operated by Shree Ramkrishna Exports Pvt. Ltd. (SRK).
An engine of the Indian economy
From an economic backwater at the time of independence, 79 years later India is today home to the world’s fifth largest economy, after the United States, China, Japan and Germany, and the third largest in terms of GDP by purchasing‑power‑parity. It is also among the top five to six consumer markets by absolute household consumption and retail sales, with a rapidly expanding middle class and urbanization driving its growth.
India’s has also surpassed China as home to the world’s largest population, which factors into predictions that by 2030 it will one the three largest economies by nominal GDP, with a consumer market in the global top three as well.
And jewelry, and more specifically diamonds, continue to play a very significant role in that remarkable story. The sector is one of India’s largest export earners and a strategically important manufacturer. Before 2023 it generated roughly $30 billion to $45 billion a year in exports, a non‑trivial share of India’s total merchandise exports, and brought substantial foreign exchange into the economy. That figure has dipped somewhat over the past two years
Its direct contribution to national GDP is modest compared with major sectors like services and agriculture, but its export intensity and value‑added manufacturing role make it disproportionately important for trade balances and industrial employment. Estimates before 2023 put direct employment in India’s organized and informal gems and jewelry value chain at up to 2 million people, with several more million more engaged indirectly, providing supply, retail, transport and services.
India’s domestic diamond jewelry market was valued at approximately $18.12 billion in 2025, and it is projected to grow at by 7.4 percent to 9.2 percent over the next several years, significantly outpacing the growth of the traditional gold jewelry segment.
Leading industry reports from early 2026 estimate the total domestic jewelry market size at nearly $99 billion, with a projected reach of over $150 billion by 2033.
The Surat Diamond Bourse, which when it opened in 2023 surpassed surpassed the Pentagon as the world’s largest office building. Prime Minister Narendra Modi described it as symbol of the new India.
Taking on a leadership role
For many years India’s diamond sector was self-contained, preferring to exert its influence quietly and behind the scenes. But that approach has changed over the past quarter century.
The Bharat Diamond Bourse joined the World Federation of Diamond Bourses in 2000, formerly integrating the world’s leading diamond cutting and polishing center into its primary international regulatory body for diamond exchanges. It hosted a World Diamond Congress for the first time in 2018. The country’s main jewelry industry association, the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), is an associate member of the WFDB. Both organizations are also key member of the World Diamond Council.
The Indian government is currently the Chair of the Kimberley Process, and will serve as such until the end of the 2026 calendar year. It is the third time that it has filled the role, having served as KP Chair in 2008 and 2019, the only country to have been appointed to the position three times.
In his seminal treatise, the Arthashastra, the ancient Indian philosopher Kautilya suggested that the goal of any economic plan was to achieve “Yogakshema,” or the peaceful enjoyment of prosperity. Writing 2,500 years ago in ancient Sanskrit, he realized then that the diamond contained within it the future success of an entire country.