The Photo is of Diamond cutting & polishing Workshop in Bombay.

Though India was known to have diamond mines many centuries ago - the fabulous Kohinoor is an Indian diamond - it has virtually no mines today. However, India has continued to maintain its tradition of diamond cutting and thousands of people are involved in this skilled occupation.

India’s diamond industry handles 80 per cent of the global polished diamond market, and earned $8 billion last year (compared to software’s $ 10 billion.)

Surat, a city of Gujarat & Bombay, 5 hours away from Surat are the hubs for Diamond Polishing Jobs. The other center for Diamond Polishing jobs is Ahmedabad itself.

India ’s diamond adventure took off in the 1970s when a small group of intrepid merchants, mostly Jains from Palanpur on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border, began invading the Belgian city of Antwerp , where 90 percent of the world’s uncut diamonds were traded each year.

In time, they would challenge another legendary clan, the Hasidic Jews, who had dominated the trade from the time they arrived from Spain and Portugal in the 1500s.

What took the Hasidim centuries to accomplish was overturned by the Jains in only two decades. They did so using tactics that the software industry replicated some years later.

First, they worked at the bottom end of the spectrum, taking up the smaller uncut diamonds that the Jews ignored as low-value.

Next, they ‘outsourced’ the finishing jobs to India (where incidentally, the diamond industry employs more people than the IT industry), while working their way up the value chain…

The Indian diamond cutting centers are concentrated in Bombay and Surat, a small town about five hours away from Bombay. Small boys, sometimes as young as 10 years old, work in hot sheds chiseling roughs which eventually get sold in the fancy shops on Fifth Avenue and Bond Street.

Their nimble fingers and sharp eyes enable them to cut these diamonds in remarkable shapes, but while they earn well for these skills many of them find their eyesight getting progressively weaker as they grow older.

But India has a large labor force and this has made the country the biggest diamond cutting center for small roughs. Indeed, were it not for Indian workers, many of these small diamonds would be put to industrial use rather than jewelry.

The Indian diamond trade generates over 4 billion dollars in exports every year -- this represents an almost 25 percent value addition to the imports of roughs.

The trade itself is controlled by a handful of companies and families, most of whom hail from the small town of Palanpur in Gujarat. Many of them are fabulously rich and divide their time between India, Belgium, Israel and other western countries.

This entire high-skill, high value trade has recently been shaken up by the conflict between the De Beers-Central Selling Organization (CSO) global diamond cartel, and Argyle of Australia, one of the biggest players in international diamond trade.

So the Surat & Bombay are the main centers for getting Diamond Polishing Jobs in India.