The Children that Cut Our Diamonds
By Janine Roberts - >
This is an excerpt from the author's not yet forth-coming
book 'Glitter and Greed'. It was about to appear as a
Doubleday - Doubleday wrote to me saying they had assessed it as
"accomplished, sensational and important". They gave me an
international contract. They put it in their advance catalogues,
designed its cover - helped me with a free flat on the slopes of
Table Mountain in South Africa from which I could do my resarch...
Then pressure came from whom they called "rich and important
people"who may have seen it in their advance catalogue - and it was
dropped - before the final text was even submitted to a lawyer.
I am now looking for a new publisher.
Cut diamonds have been India's major export for more than a
decade. Because of its low wages, India has been a powerhouse driving
the profits of the diamond industry sky high. Here it is that most of
the glitter of the diamond world is created. About 500 million
diamonds were cut in India in 1992. ii The major Indian diamond
merchants are today merchantile princes with offices in all major
international diamond centres. In 1993, India exported 12.5 million
carats worth officially US$ 3,444 million.
When the Chairman of the Central Selling
Organisation (CSO) and deputy chairman of De Beers, Nicky
Oppenheimer, came to India for the first time in February 1994,
accompanied by Anthony Oppenheimer, the president of the CSO, and
Garry Ralf, the managing director of the CSO, he spoke in a tribute
to India's service to the CSO of how India was now first in the world
both in terms of the value and of the weight of diamonds processed
having now surpassed Israel - a country that dominated in the 1970s
and the early 1980s. In 1993 Israel exported US$2,500 million
dollars' worth of cut diamonds, some billion dollars less than India.
Israel's cut diamond exports were made up of far fewer stones since
on average its diamonds were worth US$817 a carat, much more than
India's US$219. iii
The Oppenheimer cartel directly or
indirectly controls the supply of rough diamonds to India. In general
the better stones are provided to European or American merchants, the
machine cuttable to Israel and the rest to Indian. It channels
diamonds through a few favoured Indian merchants as this helps it
maintain control. About 10 Indian families controlled India's entire
output in 1992 and they were scarcely taxed at all. The rise of these
families in the past 15 years has been one of the most significant
changes in the diamond world. These Indian diamond merchant princes
are now powerful in the diamond markets of Antwerp and New York and
even in Tel Aviv.
In India De Beers is said to monitor the
Indian trade through a company called Hindustan Diamonds. When I met
the 2 Indian generals on the board of a De Beers' related company in
India, Hindustan Diamonds, I asked them what their company had done
about the living conditions of the diamond cutter. They confessed
that the living conditons were very poor, they said they wanted them
to improve, but, they asked, what could they do?
The diamond merchants of Bombay that
control the Indian diamond trade do not cut diamonds themselves. That
job is reserved to Patels who worked until comparatively recently as
agricultural workers in the state of Gujerat. The workshops that
employ them receive the uncut diamonds on a piece-work basis from a
distributor working on a commission for the merchant. A few are
processed in larger factories. Most go to be cut in Surat north of
Bombay - so I went there with a film crew to make a documentary for
WGBH Boston and for the BBC.
Surat is one of the most polluted cities I
have ever stayed in. It's factories belch smoke as if there is no
tomorrow. The roads in the centre of the town are lined with shanties
of flimsy construction, impoverished but often scrupulously clean
inside. These are the home of workers who have abandoned parched
lands in the north for work in the city. Many diamond cutters were
recruited as sharp eyed children and brought to the city by
travelling agents going from village to village. We had an Indian
researcher go into Surat ahead of us to arrange for interviews, to
find local experts and to ask for filming permissions. One of the
first places he found for us to film was a 'Diamond Nagir' or
'Diamond Village' outside Surat. He told us that this had been opened
by an Oppenheimer and that we had permission to film - but he had
been told we 'must not film the children.'
Child labour is illegal in India but young
eyes are much prized in the diamond trade. India gets all the really
small diamonds to cut and these demand the keenest of eyes. At one
factory I asked for their smallest cut diamonds. They showed me two
that were no more than specks of light. They were 'half- pointers'.
There are 100 points to a carat. A carat is one fifth of a gram.
These diamonds therefore weighted one thousandth of a gram. Each of
them had been cut with about 50 sides. They were so light that I had
to turn off the fan to insure there was not the slightest of breezes
before taking them out to examine them.
Tim Capon, a director of De Beers
Centenary, justified the high prices charged for diamonds by saying
that, among other factors, the polishing of them : 'requires skills
of a very high order.' iv I had to agree with him about the skill
involved looking at these flecks of light. It is a shame the cutters
are not paid enough to justify even moderate prices in the jewellers'
shops.
We decided that we would not promise to
exclude the children from our film at the 'Diamond Nagir' but that we
would try to film the factory nonetheless. It is situated on the
outskirts of Surat, surrounded by high walls protected by
para-military guards. The workers lived, worked, eat and slept in or
by the plant with several blocks of . flats serving as worker's
living quarters. We passed a military style sentry post through a
gate into a courtyard surrounded by single storied buildings. From
here we entered a large marbled reception area that had a shallow
pool of water with plastic frogs as a centrepiece.
Soon we were ushered into the office of
the brothers who ran the establishment. They were large and muscular
men. Their leader sat at a vast desk with a huge light over it
similar to those that light pool tables. They were keen to show us
their diamond production. For our cameras they emptied out cloth bag
after cloth bag, scattering hundreds of diamonds onto the desk's
polished surface. They clearly felt uneasy, the good humour felt
false. The atmosphere was more akin, I imagined nervously, to some
heavy scene in a gangster movie. I probably felt apprehensive because
I knew we intended to film the illegal child labour they employed.
The decore in the room was heavy, solid - a nouveau riche style. I
could not imagine the Oppenheimers in such a setting - but we were
told it was Anthony Oppenheimer who had opened this place.
But these men did not try to extract a
promise from us not to film the child labour. Instead they assigned
us escorts who would watch what we filmed. The factory rooms were
large, ventilated, although with no provision for filtering out the
pervasive dust of ground diamonds. The numbers of females working
here was unusual. Mostly it is males who cut. None of the cutters
seemed to have past their twenties - and many were much much younger,
clearly far below the legal age. Some were under 10.
One of our guides was a large hulk of a
man who scarcely said a word. He watched our video camera to see
where we directed it. If he thought us about to film a child, he
would drag the child away. This he did incredibly, naively, directly
in front of us. In one enormous workshop, he was joined in this task,
sadly, by a hump-backed man. It was like a scene from a Dickensian
novel. As they clearly did not understand the mysteries of long focus
lens, they did not spot the children we were filming. We captured on
video-tape the faces of scores of under-aged workers.
After this we returned into the swarming
anthill of diamond cutting workshops at Surat's centre. In the
evenings the dusk revealed countless windows lit by long neon tubes
slung low over the cutting wheels. We went from one workshop to
another. They were on average not much bigger than the a normal
western living room. Each housed from 3 to 5 cutting tables or
'ghantis'. . Each ghanti had 4 or 5 workers squatting around it, each
cutting on his (rarely her) segment of the cutting wheel The ghanti
is a 'scaife', or horizontal rotating cutting wheel, driven by a
motorised belt. These belts were the source of many accidents as they
were unguarded and next the unprotected legs of the cutters.
Above the cutters were garish portraits of
Ganesh, the Elephant God or of other deities, and slings holding the
cutters' scanty belongings and sleeping mats. One young man I met
kept his toothbrush taped to a ghanti. Many of the young workers
lived and slept by their cutting wheels or, sometimes, on the flat
rooftops above. Some lived in the hovels that crowded every city
space like the cars parked in a German city. One took us to his home
by a bus station. It was a tent with two sections, dirt floors and
improvised furniture. A cloud of children enveloped him as he walked
in. The hovel was meticulously clean and inhabited by elegant sari
clad women and men in tee shirts. The family made tea for us on a
fire on the floor and told of how they had come to town seeking work.
They counted themselves fortunate to have any income.
When I asked if they owned a diamond, they
laughed at the idea of such an extravaganza. They found basic medical
care very difficult to finance. They were paid by the number of
diamonds they cut per day and had to work very long hours in order to
get enough money to survive. The average pay for polishing the top
part of a diamond, was 2 rupees, less than 8 US cents in 1992. The
smaller diamonds, needing the keenest eyes, were often given to the
youngest child worker. If they were very lucky, they might make
$15-20 a week. This is below the Indian income tax level. A few
favoured cutters might manage over $30.
Most of the cutters were not protected by
India's Factory Act. Since this Act applied only to workplaces
employing more than 9 workers, many owners saved costs by registering
every pair of ghantis as a 'workplace', no matter how many pairs
there were in their workshop, thus ensuring that no 'workplace' had
more than 9 workers. This deprived the workers of the benefits of the
State Provident Scheme. This meant if they lost their job or fell
ill, they were immediately in enormous financial difficulty. Kuber,
the Bombay correspondent for the diamond industry magazine,
'Diamant', starkly described their fate if they were laid off, 'They
and their families are facing virtual starvation.'
There was likewise no enforcement of the
Child Labour Act. During periods of diamond sale booms, or 'brens' as
the trade calls them, tens of thousands of children were enticed from
the countryside by recruitors or even relatives, abandoning school
and parents for relatively good income. But, whenever De Beers
ordained a cutback in 'Indian goods' or a recession came, they were
quickly sacked. The use of child labour has been well known within
the industry for many years. It was reported by David Koskoff in his
'The Diamond World' in 1981. Kantilal Chhotalal mentioned it in his
authorative study of the Indian industry - yet nothing has been done
about it. v
Instead the number of children employed in
recent years has been rapidly expanding. In the late 1980s about 11
per cent of the diamond cutting workforce were below age. By 1994 the
number had grown alarmingly to about 16 per cent, about 64,000
children. In Surat 18 percent of the diamond workforce were underage
had in 1994, well above the national average. These children are
especially vulnerable to exploitation since they live away from their
families. An orange robed swami I met in Delhi who was campaigning
for the rights of the workes against virtual slave practices,
explained that many diamond workers were in debt bondage, trapped
into working for whatever an employer chose to pay. The diamond
cutters in Surat confirmed this when they told me of the debt trap
into which most of them fell. When they started work as children for
the diamond workshops, it was very important to them that they
managed to return at least once a year to their families for village
religious festivities. The only way most could do this was by
borrowing money from their employers for the trip. The terms of the
loan would be that they had to work for the lender until the loan was
paid off. This often turned out to be impossible with the low wages -
so the end result was that they were virtually enslaved to an
employer in 'debt bondage'.
I watched the children work. The tiny size
of the diamonds meant they could only touch the grinding wheel deftly
for a micro second at a time lest it be ground away. Then they would
swoop the diamond up to their eye, look at it through a magnifying
glass, drop it onto the wheel again. It seemed to me wrong that large
cut diamonds are worth vastly more than tiny cut diamonds. The skill
required and the repetitive strain incurred, seemed much greater for
these tiny specks of stones. Each had to have 17 facets carved in it
if it were a 'single cut', 58 facets if it were a 'full cut.'
All the diamond cutting workshops had
secure glass fronted or barred offices from where the cutters were
issued the uncut diamonds and where records were kept of the size of
the diamond before and after cutting. Often the poorer stones only
yielded a gem of a tenth of the weight of the rough stone. The poor
quality of the stones sent for cutting in India is such that on
average 72 to 85 per cent is ground away. The dust from the diamonds
had turned grey the walls and floors of some cutting shops. It
presumably did the same to the workers' lungs. Cutters in America,
Europe or Israel were less likely to be affected by dust as they were
given by the CSO a better class of diamond.
Cutting diamonds is not safe. Diamond
cutting is listed in the top 10 'hazardous industries' by the Indian
government and the employment of children under 15 is banned for this
reason. vi The diamond grinding wheels or 'scaifes', are rubbed with
kerosene oil impregnated with the diamond dust needed to grind
diamonds. The diamonds being cut are mounted on a small metal tool
known as a tang. As diamonds are ground, fine dust sprays out. Only
in one Bombay factory did I see an attempt made to capture the
diamond dust to protect the lungs of the cutters.
To the Front Page of
the Web Inquirer ->
<-
Click to return to the Library Entrance.
To Contact Jani Roberts