Ahmedabad: Rajya Sabha MP and diamond tycoon Govind Dholakia opined that the slowdown in the natural diamond industry is due to a 20 to 25% drop in demand. He attributed this decline to buyer confusion and reluctance, as consumers now want to wait a few years before purchasing real diamonds.

During the 44th Vikram Sarabhai Memorial Lecture and Book Launch at the Ahmedabad Management Association, environmentalist Kartikeya Vikram Sarabhai asked Dholakia about lab-grown diamonds. Dholakia, Founder and Chairman of Shree Ramkrishna Exports Pvt. Ltd., explained, “In the diamond business these days, lab-grown diamonds are being made from technology; this diamond is hard to differentiate from a real diamond. Earlier, we used to see from eyeglasses and recognize whether the diamond was real or not, but this is not the case with these (lab-grown) diamonds. This has created confusion among the diamond buyers about which one is real, so they now decided that we have to buy the real one, but we will do that 2-3 years later. So now the demand for real diamonds has fallen around 20–25% because people want to wait. Universally, demand and supply are interrelated, and as the demand falls, the price also goes down, but as the supply was still there, that led to recession. So recession is due to lab-grown diamond.”

“Regarding the question of whether to buy a lab-grown diamond or a real diamond, when lab-grown diamonds were first introduced, their cost was 70 paisa for every rupee spent on a real diamond. So, if a real diamond costs Rs. 100, a lab-grown diamond costs Rs. 70. Now, if a real diamond costs Rs. 1, a lab-grown diamond costs only 1 paisa. These two types of diamonds are different, as one is man-made. Meanwhile, the ages of natural diamond mines range from a minimum of 65 million years to 95 million years. Real diamonds are formed 400-500 km beneath the Earth’s crust and are brought to the surface by earthquakes. These diamonds, formed 500 km beneath the surface and older than 65 million years, carry a sense of nature, and nature is gold. To me, real diamonds are gold, as if we had not found them, I would have been working on a farm,” he added. DeshGujarat