India’s diamond-cutting industry played a pivotal role in transforming diamonds from an exclusive luxury into a more accessible product, Martin Rapaport, Chairman of the Rapaport Group, said in his keynote at the CIBJO Centenary Congress 2026 in Vicenza.
Rapaport traced the evolution of the diamond market to the large-scale processing of lower-value rough in India, where skilled and comparatively low-cost labour enabled industrial diamonds to be cut and polished into near-gem material.
According to Rapaport, diamonds that had previously been valued primarily for industrial applications at only a few dollars per carat were increasingly processed into commercially usable near-gem goods. He said this created a much broader pool of diamond material for the jewellery market.
The transformation, he argued, fundamentally expanded the addressable diamond market. As more near-gem material entered jewellery, diamonds moved beyond an exclusively high-end customer base and became accessible across a wider range of price points.
“Diamonds became a democratized luxury. Everybody could own a near-gem diamond,” Rapaport said, citing the availability of diamond jewellery at accessible price points.
Rapaport's account places India's cutting and polishing ecosystem at the centre of this market expansion.
He described a resulting distribution in which a portion of the material became gem-quality diamonds, a larger share entered the near-gem segment, while the remainder remained industrial. The large volume of near-gem material entering the market, he said, significantly expanded diamond consumption.
For India, the development represented more than a manufacturing opportunity. The expansion of cutting and polishing created employment and income for millions of people over several decades, according to Rapaport.
Rapaport also reflected on his earlier criticism of the expansion of lower-value diamonds in the Indian market, recalling a debate with former De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer.
He said Oppenheimer argued that consumers buying smaller or lower-value diamonds could eventually move up to larger purchases. Rapaport said he subsequently reconsidered the argument after listening to the research behind it.
The episode highlights a larger question now facing the diamond industry: whether the market's historic expansion through greater accessibility can coexist with a renewed push to position natural diamonds as scarce, emotional luxury products.
CIBJO reported that Rapaport's broader keynote called for the industry to reposition natural diamonds around emotional and luxury value, amid the pressure created by synthetic diamonds and declining prices for some natural polished categories.
Rapaport's remarks offer an important perspective on India's role in the global diamond economy. The country's cutting and polishing industry helped take lower-value rough and create a much larger commercial market for diamonds.
That same expansion, however, contributed to a market where diamonds became available across increasingly broad price points.