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Diamonds cut in India more likely to be real

Sanjay Suri
India Abroad Correspondent in London

Diamonds cut in India might be smaller -- but they are more likely to be diamonds. That's the good news for Indian manufacturers amid fears of fake diamonds flooding the world market.

"Faking would not be viable for the smaller stones that are cut and polished in India," a spokeswoman for De Beers, the dominant dealer in wholesale diamonds around the world told rediff.com in London on Monday.

An estimated seven out of ten diamonds sold around the world are cut and polished in India, mostly around Bombay and Surat.

The Indian market largely has the cutting and polishing of small diamonds. In the face of a growing market in fake diamonds that tend to be bigger, small is beginning to look truly beautiful.

"A lot of the stones cut and polished in India come from the Argyle mines in Australia," the De Beers spokeswoman said.

De Beers itself supplies a lot of roughs to Indian dealers for polishing, she said. Given the sizes of the stones supplied, the Indian produce is definitely the real thing.

Fears over fake diamonds have grown after even experts and dealers with years of experience have failed to tell real diamonds from fakes.

The fakes are beginning to eat increasingly into a world diamond jewellery market, worth an estimated $6 billion a year.

De Beers has launched an extensive research programme "to ensure we're ahead of the problem," the De Beers spokeswoman said. "Our researchers are developing techniques so that we can ensure that consumer confidence is maintained."

De Beers hopes to build scanners that can tell the real from the fake. But right now few could tell the difference.

The fakes are being made mostly in Ukraine and other areas of the former Soviet Union in factories that used to produce synthetic diamonds for industrial use. These businesses have been 'diverted' now to produce synthetic diamonds for use as gems.

These Russian machines are also being used legitimately to produce cultured gems sold as such and not as real diamonds. But out at a party - or even under the gaze of a diamond dealer - no one could tell the difference between a cultured diamond and a real one.

De Beers fears now that many of these cultured diamonds could be resold and passed off as real diamonds.

The machines in these countries have also been using high-power beams to improve the appearance of diamonds of low quality. It would not be cost-effective, however, for these machines to produce small cultured diamonds of the carat equivalent of the small stones polished in India, or to 'improve' the quality of small stones.

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