Carat$1,195 million to $307 million: Surat shrugs at Russia's cutting cluster
India's rough imports from Russia fell from $1,195 million in FY2022-23 to $307 million in FY2025-26, a fall of 74.3%. Surat's manufacturers say a Yakutia cluster changes nothing.
§1A collapse that already happened.
The number Surat is answering with is a collapse that already happened. Indian imports of Russian rough ran at $1,195 million in FY2022-23 and at $307 million in FY2025-26, a fall of $888 million or 74.3% on this desk's arithmetic, which is to say the trade shrank to just over a quarter of itself across three years of sanctions. Those figures come from Diamond City, the Surat trade paper, in a report published on 24 August. Russia once supplied roughly 30% of the world's rough. The question its report puts is whether a new Russian cutting cluster claws any of that back, and the answer from the men who own the wheels in Surat is that it does not.
The policy description belongs to the outlet, and this paper attributes it rather than confirming it. The report states that an executive order signed on 6 August sets up a diamond-cutting cluster between the Republic of Sakha, which is Yakutia, and the Smolensk region, where Alrosa's Kristall cutting works sits; that Russia is preparing an 8% export duty on its rough; and that miners will be obliged to offer rough and semi-polished goods to the cluster's domestic manufacturers before taking them to the open market. Diamond City carries its own secondary-research disclaimer on that material. This desk did not obtain the order and does not present the detail as its own verified reading of it.
§2The argument from arithmetic.
The Surat case against it is an argument from arithmetic rather than sentiment. Dinesh Navadiya, chairman of the Indian Diamond Institute, and manufacturers quoted alongside him make the point that Botswana and Russia have both tried to build domestic cutting before and that neither matched Surat's scale or its cost, where more than 800,000 skilled workers process nine of every ten rough stones in the world. Dubai-based rough traders and large Surat importers add the timing objection: with demand slow and margins thin, nobody is funding new factories, shifting Indian cutters to Russia or training Russian ones. The United States takes about 30% of India's gem and jewellery exports and Russian goods remain under sanction, so an Indian firm setting up inside Russia would be trading its largest market for its smallest.
Surat lost $888 million of Russian rough and kept its position.
§3What the report does not settle.
What the report does not settle is worth naming. It gives no capacity figure for the cluster, no timetable, no employment target and no volume the 8% duty is expected to redirect, so there is no quantity against which Surat's confidence can be tested. Nor does it reconcile the two halves of its own story: if Russian rough into India has already fallen 74.3% under sanctions, the cluster is not competing for a trade India currently has. It is competing for goods that are already going somewhere other than Surat, and the report does not say where.
The interesting number here is not the cluster, it is the $307 million. A supply line worth $1,195 million three years ago is now worth less than a third of that, and Surat absorbed the loss without losing its position, which is the strongest evidence available that a Russian cutting cluster is a second-order problem for it. The first-order problem is that world demand is slow and margins are thin, and both of those are true whether or not a press starts in Yakutia. Surat is right about Russia and it is answering the easier question.
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