CaratIIGJ and IIT Madras split 90 hours, and 60 of them are physics
The Indian Institute of Gems & Jewellery and IIT Madras's InCent-LGD centre launched a 90-hour hybrid certificate on 2 September. Sixty of the ninety hours are IIT Madras's, and only twelve are on campus.
§1A single-source announcement, primary party.
India has put a syllabus behind its lab-grown programme. The Indian Institute of Gems and Jewellery, which is supported by the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council, has launched a Certificate in Lab-Grown Diamond Technology with the India Centre for Lab-Grown Diamond at IIT Madras, known as InCent-LGD. The programme runs 90 hours in a hybrid format across evening and weekend sessions. It was announced on 2 September at 05:35 UTC in Solitaire, the council's own magazine, and this is a single-source item: no independent trade pickup was found by this paper's overnight desk or on a repeat check this morning. It is printed because the source is the announcing body itself, which is the standing of a company release rather than a third-party claim.
§2Two thirds physics, one third trade.
The split is the number worth carrying. IIGJ delivers 30 of the 90 hours, all live online, covering the global diamond industry, the emergence of lab-grown goods, market and consumer fundamentals, entrepreneurship, trade and exports, regulatory frameworks and a strategic outlook. IIT Madras delivers the other 60: 48 hours live online and 12 hours of campus immersion. Its half of the curriculum is materials science and process engineering, listing graphite and diamond structures, high pressure high temperature growth, microwave plasma chemical vapour deposition, growth through MPCVD, post-processing and advanced characterisation. Two thirds of the course is therefore the physics of making the stone, a third is the business of selling it, and 13.33% of the total is in a room.
Sixty of the ninety hours are physics. Thirty are the trade.
§3What the announcement does not say.
What is not published is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as an absence. The announcement carries no fee, no cohort size, no start date, no admission requirement and no statement of accreditation or credit weighting. It gives an email address and a telephone number and nothing else that can be priced. This desk has not found a second document carrying any of it. A trade paper can report the structure of a course exactly, because 30 plus 48 plus 12 is checkable arithmetic, and cannot report its cost or its scale, because neither has been said.
§4The press in August, the people in September.
The context is this paper's own reporting, on both sides. On 25 August this desk reported InCent-LGD's prototype high pressure press at IIT Madras, built under a 242 crore rupee research programme, with large components for a full-scale commercial machine shipped in for assembly. That was hardware. This is the people to run it, from the same centre, seven weeks into the same programme.
The price backdrop is less comfortable. Our tape carries the one-carat lab-grown reference at $676 this morning, a dollar above yesterday, and Rapaport's August price release, reported elsewhere in today's edition, names consumers cooling on lab-grown stones as one reason natural goods in the 1 to 1.49-carat band steadied.
Training capacity is the least reversible thing a country can build in this trade and it is being built for a product whose price has been falling for two years. Those two facts are not in conflict. India's exposure to lab-grown is manufacturing exposure, not retail margin, and 60 hours of MPCVD and characterisation is a bet on being the place that grows and processes the material at cost rather than the place that sells it at a premium.
A jeweller reading this from the retail side should take one thing from it: the supply of people who understand how these stones are made is about to increase, and the technical scarcity that supported early margins is not what it was.
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