Diamonds are forever in Botad

The price of land has gone up to Rs 10,000 per square metre. This has also pushed the rent up.

What is different about the business in Botad is that roughs discarded by diamond polishing units in the bigger centres like Mumbai, Surat, and Ahmedabad are bought in bulk whatever can be salvaged is polished. Most of it is of low value.

Mumbai dealers pass on rejects to their man in Botad. He in turn gives them to the polishing units. He then assesses the worked pieces, pays for the work, making deductions for blemishes. He is paid a commission by the Mumbai dealers when he returns the worked pieces. Labour is cheap. The work is mostly done by jobbers in the time they can spare from working in the fields. The labourers are mostly Kanbi farmhands Patels, who earlier used to work the diamond polishing units in Mumbai and Surat.

Kanbi Patels of the Amreli and Bhavnagar regions provided labour for the diamond Surat, which began in the fifties when the cost of labour in Mumbai went up.

In the sixties, Surat, too, became costly, and the business shifted to Bhavnagar. From here it spread to smaller towns lime Gariadhar, Savarkundla, and Vinchchia. Units also came up in villages like Lathidad, Turkha, and Sangavadar. But it was Botad that picked up the business in rejects.

This coincided with the return of some 25,000 diamond cutters and businessmen from Surat and Mumbai in the early eighties, when there was a recession. They found that salvaged diamonds were good business, and many of them opted for it.

The same Kanbis who had left the fields for earning in Surat they returned to work as farmhands, but their diamond-polishing skills served the units that had come up in Botad.

According to Kalubhai Patel, 41-year-old president of the Botad Diamond Association, the business began on a very small scale but soon picked momentum. The thrifty Patels involved in the business passed on this work to relatives at home.

Ishwarbhai Patel, vice-president of the association, was down-to-earth. He said none of the Botad diamond merchants would turn crorepati yet they are not badly off either. And they provide supplementary employment to several youth: the job workers usually work in the fields in the morning, and by afternoon go to the diamond units.

The income from the fields ensures survival; the income from diamond cutting is a bonus that ensures comfortable standards of living.

According to Ishwarbhai Patel, 25 per cent of the workforce comprises women, most of whom are illiterate. As the work does not demand as much accuracy as high-grade diamonds, and is easy to pick up, about anybody can take to polishing reject diamonds.

This is evident in the hundreds who flock to the Neelam complex. There is even a mini-bus service plying between Nirmalnagar diamond centre in Bhavnagar and Botad every half an hour, with annual passes for the regulars.