The Diamond Industry's Enormous Workforce

Imagine a global luxury product, a polished diamond eventually set into a ring sold in a jewellery store in New York or London, and realising that behind that single finished stone sits a genuinely enormous Indian workforce, over 800,000 workers in Surat alone, part of a broader gem and jewellery sector employing between 1.0 and 1.2 million people across Surat, Mumbai, Jaipur and countless smaller MSME cutting and polishing units nationally.

This workforce concentration in Surat specifically connects directly to the roughly 90 percent of the world's diamonds that pass through the city's cutting and polishing operations covered elsewhere on this site, an extraordinary geographic concentration of a specific manual and technical skill, precision diamond cutting, that has made Surat synonymous with this trade globally in much the way other cities became known for a single dominant industrial specialisation.

This workforce faces genuine, direct exposure to exactly the disruptions covered throughout this page, the Alrosa sanctions-driven furloughs, the US tariff crisis affecting natural diamond exports, both covered elsewhere on this site, translate immediately into real job losses and reduced working hours for cutters and polishers who depend on steady rough diamond supply and finished goods export demand for their livelihoods, with industry forecasts warning of 100,000-150,000 potential job losses specifically if natural diamond export orders continue declining.

This employment scale is exactly why the lab-grown diamond transition covered throughout this page carries such genuine social significance beyond its commercial story, Surat's workforce's cutting and polishing skills transfer directly to lab-grown stones, covered under the LGD startup ecosystem elsewhere on this site, meaning the industry's pivot toward lab-grown production represents a genuine employment lifeline for exactly the workers whose livelihoods the natural diamond squeeze, covered elsewhere on this site, would otherwise threaten most directly.