THAT Surat is famous for its diamond industry is well known. That you cannot just walk in to take a look at this industry as you might do, say, the textiles and zari industries in the city, few visitors know. It pays if you know somebody who knows somebody working for one of the many Surti diamond manufacturers, importers and exporters. The UpperCrust contact was Rakesh Gandhi, chief accountant in Godhani Gems, one of Surat�s top diamond houses. The Godhani family is shy to rate itself as being among the top names in the business in Surat. �But ours is a big name, we do a turnover of Rs. 300 crore,� said Manojbhai Godhani, one of the five partners of the business. He and his brother Hiteshbhai run the business in Surat. The other three partners, including a third brother, Anilbhai, and two cousins, Vinodbhai and his wife Reshmabhen, sit in the Godhani Gems� head office in Bombay. It is located at Panchratna in Opera House which is India�s diamond bourse. Surat is the factory, the manufacturing unit. In Bombay, Godhani Gems also has a diamond jewellery factory at SEEPZ in Andheri.

The business is conducted in Surat from a secure and highly-protected posh building at a quaint area called Gotala Wadi, Green Lines. Godhani Gems basically imports raw material from Antwerp, processes it, manufactures diamonds, and then exports them to about 70 buyers worldwide and especially in the US, Japan and Hongkong. They export diamonds. not branded items in jewellery, which is what most people think the diamond manufacturers in Surat are upto. �We import, manufacture and export diamond, that is our business,� explained Hiteshbhai Godhani, the younger brother in Surat. �We have no local buyers. Our buyers are in US and Japan. In Hong Kong, unfortunately, the trend has changed. After the Chinese takeover, the diamond trade there went down. We had a factory in Hong Kong which we shut.�

The brothers Godhani are proud to show off the business in Surat. They share an office which, strangely, looks like a brightly lit film set in some Bollywood studio. Sitting behind a long, highly-polished glass table on which are mounted flatscreen computers, and all the tools of the trade, like the diamond eyeglass, calculator, weighing scale, supari, and a photograph of the spiritual leader Swaminarayan, Manojbhai and Hiteshbhai survey their empire at work over closed circuit televisions. There are 32 cameras all over the four-storeyed building that show them exactly what their staff of 300-plus is upto. The employees are all young boys, the Godhanis don�t employ women for some reason, and every single member on their staff is in some way related to the family. They don�t take on outsiders, too. That way, there is complete trust in their workers. �One small diamond is worth lakhs, we need to trust our staff, besides we have a foolproof system of working. Everybody is given a target at the start of the day and this is entered against his name.

At the end of the day, he is accountable for what has been given to him,�said Hiteshbhai. When Godhani Gems imports its diamonds, these are sent directly to the head office in Bombay, then from there brought to Surat. The diamonds come in assorted sizes and are graded according to their sizes, clarity and colour. After that, they are cleaned and then laser cut, polished, graded and then only sent to buyers. It is a long and tedious process, with the young boys at work bent painstakingly over small diamonds for many hours in a day. �The work requires a sharp brain and eyes as well,� said Rakesh Gandhi, the chief accountant. �All the boys at work here have been trained on the job.� Bulk of the work is computerised, for instance a programme tells them that it will take 2 hours and 41 minutes to laser cut a 15 carat diamond. And the diamonds cost as much as Rs. 2.15 lakh a carat. Sometimes there are mistakes in the cutting, but not often, and when the diamonds are cut by blade, then the chances of breakage and weight loss is reduced further.