Scavenging on road for lost diamonds

Manas Dasgupta

Ahmedabad, September 9

In a strange site, hundreds of people were seen scavenging the dust of the Surat city road in Katargam locality ignoring the honking by the vehicular traffic this morning. Surat in south Gujarat is one of the major centres of diamond cutting and polishing industry.

This happened following rumour that a diamond trader carrying a packet of polished diamonds lost some pieces of the precious stone on the road due to damages in the packet during transit. Rumour was also agog that some labourers had “actually recovered” some pieces from the dust.

As the rumour spread, hundreds of people armed with dusters and other handy equipment got down on to the road scavenging the dust looking for the precious stones, unconcerned that the traffic on the main road had come to a grinding halt. The crowd of “scavengers” included people from some good families, particularly children and women but till evening no one confirmed if anyone succeeded in finding any piece of diamond despite day-long scavenging.