Diamond workers now polish odd jobs to bring sparkle in life

Rajkot/Surat: With the pandemic robbing the sheen off their livelihoods, Surat’s diamond polishers from Amreli are now seeking refuge in the shelter of their ancestral professions back in their homesteads.

Amreli district administration estimates a total of nearly 2.33 lakh diamond workers have returned home from Surat owing to lack of jobs in the pandemic-affected diamond sector. Back home, the hands that wielded the emery wheel efficiently, now try to polish different odd jobs to a new sparkle.

“When there was no work left in Surat, I was forced to migrate to Amreli, my hometown, uprooting my family of 10 members with me. My ancestors were hair dressers. My father had taught me the art in my childhood, which now I will have to reintroduce myself to. I have no options but to get hands on in my ancestral profession and set up a hair cutting salon,” said Deepak Mesuriya, recalling his heyday as a polisher living in the diamond city’s Varachha area.

And so does Jagdish Koli, who repairs punctures of tyres of two-wheelers and four-wheelers with the same keen eye that made the rough turn into a diamond in his nimble hands. “I was optionless, but as I knew how to repair punctures, I opened a roadside puncture repair shop,” Koli told TOI.

The recession had not only hit small-time polishers, but even the bigger officials like Bhautik Naseet, who was a manager in a diamond unit in Surat, but had to return home to Amreli. But his is a story that paints the actual mess most of the migrants are in at present. While they have lost touch with ancestral skills, there is no requirement for their present ones.

“Management is my only skill asset. I can do nothing else and so have taken up work as a labour contractor here. The unit where I was working shut shop and now, I don’t want to return to the corona-infested city any more,” said the man whose dreams didn’t cut big in the rough market.

Gabharu Mudhava has taken up animal husbandry and now trades in cow and buffalo milk — his ancestral profession.

Kamlesh Patel has returned home to be a farmer cultivating groundnut in his farm, and sowing hopes of doing better than what he could as a diamond worker.