India’s lab-grown diamond story has crossed a genuine milestone this year.
In March and April 2026, India’s exports of polished lab-grown diamonds overtook natural diamonds by volume for the first time — 1.3 million and 1.4 million carats, against 1.2 million and 1.3 million carats of natural stones, according to Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC) data. As per experts, it might be “a major shift, arguably a tectonic one, but not a doomsday scenario” for natural diamonds.
This is the backdrop against which Mehta is arguing that India isn’t waiting to build its next Kohinoor — it’s already doing it, repeatedly, in a reactor.
The same 100-kilometre miracle, rebuilt in Surat
Ask Mehta how a lab-grown diamond is actually made, and he skips the jargon.
“The same process that actually occurs 100 kilometres deep within the Earth is now recreated in a lab,” he says.
Reactors blast a small diamond seed with hydrocarbons at extreme heat and pressure — fast-forwarding geology. “In about three to four weeks, we are able to accumulate pure carbon, which effectively becomes a rough diamond,” he explains. After that, cutting and polishing are identical to natural stones.
The technology isn’t new — it’s been around for over a decade and a half, Mehta says. India just caught on to it in a big way in 2024.
And when it did, it landed almost entirely in one city. “Ninety-five percent of all of these labs are in Surat,” he says — the same city that already cuts and polishes roughly 90% of the world’s natural diamonds.
That overlap, Mehta argues, is quietly turning Surat into a city that controls an entire diamond supply chain for the first time.
Across the full FY 2025-26, India’s polished lab-grown exports reached 18.8 million carats, ahead of 16 million carats for natural diamonds — a gap of roughly 2.8 million carats,
Price is still the widest gap of all. Lab-grown stones now sell at wholesale prices roughly 88–92% lower per carat than natural diamonds, and that gap keeps widening.
The price gap is what actually moves buyers. A one-carat natural solitaire in top colour and clarity runs roughly ₹3.5–4 lakh, Mehta says. An equivalent lab-grown stone costs around ₹40,000 — close to a 90% saving.
That gap widens further as stones get bigger. It’s why, he says, Indian buyers overwhelmingly choose lab-grown once they’re shopping for solitaires, while very small stones still sometimes get bought natural, out of habit.
Why True Diamond refuses to pick a side
Zoom out, and India’s broader gems and jewellery exports rose 26.5% in June 2026 to $2.21 billion, with lab-grown diamonds specifically drawing “tremendous response” from price-conscious international buyers, per trade data
Domestically, India’s lab-grown diamond jewellery market is valued at $453.7 million in 2026 and is projected to grow to $1.8 billion by 2036 — a 14.8% CAGR.
New rules have entered the picture too. Since January 2026, the Bureau of Indian Standards has enforced IS 19469:2025, which reserves the word “diamond” alone for natural stones and bans vaguer labels like “cultured” or “nature’s” for lab-grown ones.
Unlike brands built purely around the “lab-grown versus natural” debate, Mehta says True Diamond sells both — deliberately.
“We’ve tried to not get into that debate as strongly anymore of, hey, is this better than the other,” he says. “We let the customer choose.”
He’s candid that the natural diamond industry’s pushback against lab-grown is, in his view, reasonable rather than adversarial. “If the natural diamond business is not going to be sustainable, lab-grown will likely be seriously affected,” he says.
“For one to survive, you kind of need both.”
That coexistence hasn’t stopped legacy jewellers from hedging their bets. Mehta points to Titan quietly building a separate lab-grown line rather than folding it into Tanishq.
It’s proof, he says, that even India’s biggest names see the category as too large to ignore — but still risky enough to keep at arm’s length from their core brand.
The world’s brightest diamond
Where Mehta gets animated is design.
A standard round diamond has 57 facets. When a rival brand patented a version with roughly 75, it caused a stir. True Diamond’s answer was the Portuguese cut — a stone with over 160 facets, nearly three times a regular diamond’s count, built for maximum sparkle and fire.
“It’s pretty well considered the world’s brightest diamond,” Mehta says.
He adds that this level of faceting was nearly impossible in natural stones, where one cutting error ruins an irreplaceable rough. Lab-grown, being more forgiving and scalable, made it viable — but only in larger stones, from two carats up.
The brand has pushed the same experimentation into colour and shape: oval diamonds engineered to eliminate the “bow tie” shadow long considered unavoidable, plus lab-grown stones in red, champagne and green — hues Mehta says rarely occur in nature at accessible sizes.
So, does India get its own Kohinoor?
The Kohinoor, Mehta explains, is a Type IIa diamond — the rarest, purest classification, pure carbon with no nitrogen or structural impurities.
His point: “All lab-grown diamonds today are Type IIa. So all lab-grown diamonds have the same purity as the Kohinoor.” Technically, he says, India isn’t waiting to manufacture a legendary diamond — it’s already doing it, repeatedly, at industrial scale.
What’s missing isn’t quality, in his telling, but narrative. “Will we be able to weave certain stories behind the product is the real question,” he says. “That story is what will matter and make the difference.”
He predicts the next phase of the category won’t be about chasing one iconic stone at all. “I don’t think people are going to want just one Kohinoor,” he says. “People are going to want fifteen Kohinoors to be worn at different times.”
Accessible, though, doesn’t mean cheap. True Diamond’s average order value even on lab-grown pieces sits around ₹1 lakh — the brand specialises exclusively in diamond rings, walking customers through a 15–20 minute consultation before showing any inventory at all.
“It’s not a small… I mean, our average order value when we sell a lot of lab-grown is still one lakh,” Mehta says. “It’s not cheap at all.”
Founded in 2024 by Mehta and Parin Shah, True Diamond has leaned hard into storytelling over stock — building an outsized social media following, closing a ₹26 crore pre-Series A round led by India Quotient last year, and turning a “no deal” exit from Shark Tank India into viral content rather than a setback.
It fits Mehta’s own description of what the company has become. “I don’t think we are a jeweller,” he says. “We are today more like a media house that sells jewellery.”
Whether that’s enough to give India a diamond as culturally loaded as the Kohinoor remains to be seen. But if Mehta is right, the raw material for the next one is already sitting in a reactor in Surat — waiting on a story.
