The newly granted Surat Cut diamond GI tag promises to recognise craftsmanship, skill, and one of India’s most remarkable industrial success stories. But can a legal framework built to protect places truly capture value created by mobile communities whose expertise travels across borders? Writing on this development, Niharika Salar explores how the Surat GI both advances and exposes the limits of India’s geographical indications regime, where the real story may be less about land and more about labour. Niharika is a Doctoral Candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. [Long post ahead.]
Surat Cut GI tag for Diamond and Terroir: an Unfinished Love Story
By Niharika Salar
While roaming around the beautiful city of Antwerp, Belgium, during a work visit, I noticed something very interesting. I was somewhat aware of Antwerp’s reputation for its diamond industry, but seeing it firsthand was a different experience altogether. The interesting bit was the familiar Gujarati surnames on various jewellery stores. I had a vague idea that some Gujaratis had migrated from India to Antwerp and had established themselves in the diamond trade, but noticing their presence so prominently made it feel much more intriguing and the resulting Google search.
The Art of the Cut
Cut (pun intended) to a few days back when I saw the news about Surat cut diamond being granted a GI tag, I was curious and was trying to connect the dots. Since my ongoing PhD revolves around Geographical Indications (‘GI’), and I was in the middle of drafting a chapter on how the French concept of terroir doesn’t quite sits neatly within the Indian textile context, this really caught my attention. What exactly is the Surat cut diamond? What does the application say? How is it a cut above the rest (pun intended)? But if I remember correctly, some of these craftsmen had moved away? Does that have any impact in critically thinking about this GI application? But then what sets the difference between 2 cuts?
A rough diamond doesn’t look special at all. It’s more like a dull, greasy pebble and this where the cutter’s job matters the most. The aim is to transform it into something that sparkles beautifully while keeping as much of its weight as possible, which involves a careful balancing act. Diamonds are first scanned in 3D to plan the best cut, then split into workable pieces using natural lines, lasers, or saws. They are usually shaped into a round form and carefully polished by hand to create flat surfaces, known as facets, that give off that signature sparkle. A standard round diamond has about 58 of these facets (just to give a sense of how detailed and labour-intensive the process is). The key lies in precise angles, based on principles developed by Marcel Tolkowsky in 1919, ensuring light reflects internally rather than escaping. Every cut has its own significance. Round cuts maximize brilliance, for instance. Other cuts like princess, oval, and emerald offer different visual effects. The whole point of a cut is to make the diamond as shiny as possible and, therefore, saleable.
The Origins of GI Law
When France’s Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (Law on the Protection of Appellations of Origin) system became the template for the world’s GI framework, it was built around a rather simple idea: that place makes the product. The ‘terroir’ concept encoded geography as destiny, and when this framework was exported globally through the TRIPS Agreement, it carried that assumption with it. Place protects product. Humans are, at best, incidental.
How Surat dethroned Antwerp
So then, is the place related to a cut? A yes and a no. Take Antwerp for example. Historically, the industry there was shaped by distinct migrant groups. A large part of the trade was once dominated by Jewish communities, who brought cutting and trading expertise to the city. From the late 20th century onward, there was a major shift with the rise of Indian diamantaires (especially families from Gujarat like Palanpuri Jain and Patel communities). They played a significant role in both trading and cutting networks. What’s important is that Antwerp functions more like a global hub than a purely “Belgian” industry. Diamonds are sourced from Africa, cut in places like India, traded in Antwerp, and sold worldwide. So, the people working there often reflect these transnational supply chains rather than a single national identity. In the 1970s and 80s, Antwerp handled about 90% of the world’s diamond polishing and processing. By 2000, Surat had started gaining ground, and today Surat processes around 95% of global diamonds.
This shift began when Gujarati migrants brought rough diamonds from Africa and local artisans in Surat started working on them. Training institutes were later set up by the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council and private firms to build skills in cutting and polishing. Surat focused on small diamonds. This was a segment which was mostly ignored by Antwerp, and benefited from growing global demand for these stones. After 2000, Surat expanded quickly by adopting new technologies like laser mapping, AI grading, and automated polishing. It also built a complete ecosystem where importing, processing, grading, certification, and jewelry design all happen in one place. At the same time, the diamond industry globally is starting to gradually move towards lab-grown diamonds, with the Government of India actively promoting domestic production through targeted policy measures.
What Does the Application Say?
The Surat cut GI application got me thinking about how these concepts align or do they align at all? One look at the application and some things become crystal clear (pun intended). Unlike the Panna diamond GI tag, Surat has no special soil for diamonds. It has no unique climate, no geological accident that makes its diamonds chemically distinct. What it has is people, specifically, the Hira Karigars (diamond craftsman) of Varachha Road, the Saurashtra Patel community who migrated from drought-stricken villages in Amreli and Bhavnagar from the 1960s onward, learned the craft within weeks, and built one of the world’s most remarkable industrial ecosystems in the process. The GI application acknowledges this with unusual honesty. I say this because the communities have been named, their migration patterns have been described, detailing the Ghanti workshops (Hindi for small cottage unit where one or a few workers use a diamond-dusted rotating wheel to cut and polish rough diamonds) and the generational transmission of faceting knowledge has been acknowledged in multiple forms throughout the application.
When the Karigar Crosses the Border, Does the Cut Follow?
One could think of it as a conceptual leap for an IP registry more accustomed to certifying agricultural or handicraft goods. The Surat cut GI is an attempt, however imperfect, to make the GI framework do something it was never quite designed to do: recognize the human factor as the primary source of value. But here is where the scenario becomes more interesting, albeit with a sense of discomfort. The moment you anchor a GI in a community skill rather and not the geography, you have to confront a question the framework is unable to answer: what happens when the community/part of the community moves?
The Surat cut GI application itself tells part of this story. It acknowledges that Palanpur Banias and Saurashtra Patel merchants travelled directly to Antwerp to source rough diamonds. What it does not fully acknowledge is the reverse flow i.e. the ways in which Gujarati knowledge, skill, and commercial networks had a big share in shaping Antwerp’s own diamond industry. Antwerp’s diamond district has historically had a significant Indian presence, and specifically a Gujarati one. So much so that in the 2012 elections to the Antwerp World Diamond Center, five out of the six representatives elected to the board were Gujarati. The same community that helped turn Varachha Road into the world’s diamond hub also made its mark in the Belgian city that once handled 90% of global diamond processing. Wherever they went, their skills went with them. And that is inconsistent with the GI framework. If a Saurashtra Patel karigar moves to Antwerp and cuts diamonds there using the same technique, the same loupe, the same instinct for crown angles and pavilion depth he picked up in a Surat workshop, can you still call it a Surat Cut Diamond? The GI label says no. The geography says no. But the skill and know-how say yes.
Protecting a Place When the Point is the People
These kinds of migration patterns, which are synonymous with how business communities’ function, reveal an uncomfortable reality in what the Surat diamond cut GI tag is attempting. If the cut’s distinctiveness belongs to the community, and the community crosses borders, then the GI tag is protecting the wrong thing. It is certifying a postcode when it should be recognising people. In fact, that confusion is demonstrated in the GI application itself. While crediting specific communities, the GI application goes on to state the geography in terms of “major” manufacturing areas and “partial” manufacturing area (see the image from the GI application below):
India’s GI framework, modeled on TRIPS and European GI law, does not have a clean instrument for community-based IP. What exists in its place is an awkward workaround, so to say. The Surat GI tag designates almost the entire state of Gujarat as its production zone, a territorial claim so broad and vague, it immediately signals that geography is not really the point. In fact, the Palanpuri Jain and Kathiawadi Patel communities debated the future of the diamond industry. At the center of the debate was whether the industry should be entirely relocated from Mumbai (A GI application was filed under the name “Poddar Diamond” has since been abandoned.) to Surat. This just adds to the doubts around authenticity claims specific to Surat. How long have these communities been associated with diamond-related skills in Surat, if they have a significant presence in Mumbai too? And to what extent did these skills develop organically within Surat? This kind of expansiveness is a result of an IP registry trying to be inclusive of a mobile, dispersed community while remaining within the territorial logic that the law demands. It is geography being used as a proxy for community, because the system has no other available language.
An Unfinished Cut: Strong Idea but Incomplete Legal Language
A more intellectually honest tag might be called something like the Saurashtra Patel Diamond Cut, a community mark rather than a GI. But India’s IP registry does not have that instrument ready. And so, the registry does what it can within the tools it has, accepting a GI application that gestures at people while officially protecting a place.
The Surat cut GI isn’t exactly a failure, but it’s not a complete win either. It feels more like a work-in-progress in the form of an ongoing attempt to reshape a system that was originally designed for things like wine regions and apply it to artisanal labour economies. In a way, it’s about trying to make a largely western IP framework actually work for Indian realities (which goes far beyond Indian geography). When you compare it to the Panna diamond GI, the difference is quite striking. Panna keeps the focus almost entirely on the land, leaving the people behind the process invisible. Surat, on the other hand, brings the community into the picture, highlights skill, and recognises that the real value comes from human expertise, not just natural resources. Having said that, it’s still a work in progress. The questions it raises are hard to ignore. If skill becomes the basis for a GI, then whose skill are we talking about, and where does it belong? If what’s being protected is community knowledge, does that protection move with the community, or does it stay tied to a specific location? Until India’s IP system finds a way to formally recognise communities, not just places, the Surat cut GI will remain a strong idea that hasn’t quite found the appropriate legal vocabulary yet.
