India's Jewellery Trade Opens New Doors for Gulf and Global Buyers at IIJS Bharat Premiere 2026

India's flagship gem and jewellery trade exhibition, IIJS Bharat Premiere, opened this week across two venues in Mumbai, marking the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of a show that has grown into one of the world's most influential business-to-business platforms for the global jewellery industry. Spanning more than one hundred thirty-five thousand square metres of exhibition space and featuring upwards of two thousand one hundred exhibitors across roughly three thousand six hundred stalls, the exhibition is expected to draw more than fifty thousand visitors over its run, including more than two thousand seven hundred international buyers representing over eighty countries — a buyer base in which Gulf markets, and the United Arab Emirates in particular, continue to occupy an outsized and strategically important position.

The exhibition runs at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai's Bandra Kurla Complex from August 5 to 9, with a parallel venue at the Bombay Exhibition Centre in Goregaon running from August 6 to 10 hosting the show's continuation alongside the India Gem and Jewellery Machinery Expo, a concurrent event focused specifically on the manufacturing technology and precision engineering equipment that underpins India's jewellery production base. Running the two shows concurrently reflects organisers' recognition that international buyers increasingly want visibility not only into finished jewellery products, but into the manufacturing infrastructure and technological capability that allows Indian producers to deliver at the scale, consistency and price competitiveness that has made the country the preferred sourcing destination for a large share of the world's cut and polished diamonds and finished jewellery.

For the UAE specifically, and for the broader community of Indian-origin jewellery entrepreneurs who have built substantial trading and retail operations across the Gulf over recent decades, IIJS Bharat Premiere functions as considerably more than a routine trade show stop on the international exhibition calendar. Dubai in particular has developed into one of the world's most significant jewellery and precious metals trading hubs in its own right, with its Gold Souk and broader jewellery trading district built substantially on the foundations laid by generations of Indian-origin traders and manufacturers who established operations in the emirate as it grew into a regional and eventually global trading centre. The relationship between India's manufacturing base and the UAE's trading and retail infrastructure has become deeply symbiotic over the decades, with a significant share of the raw and semi-finished product flowing through Mumbai's exhibition halls each year ultimately finding its way into Dubai's retail and re-export channels, from where it reaches consumers across the wider Gulf region, Europe and beyond.

Addressing the exhibition's opening, Kirit Bhansali, Chairman of the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council, framed the anniversary edition as reflecting the global industry's continued confidence in Indian craftsmanship, manufacturing scale and innovation capability, while also pointing to India's growing ambitions to move beyond its traditional role as a cutting and polishing centre toward becoming a more significant trading hub for rough diamonds in its own right. Central to that ambition is a proposed fifteen-year tax exemption for rough diamond sales conducted through India's Special Notified Zones, a measure introduced as part of the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2026, currently before India's Parliament. Bhansali described the proposed exemption as a landmark structural reform for the industry, noting that India has historically cut and polished the overwhelming majority of the world's diamonds without ever developing a comparable domestic trading market for rough stones — a gap the proposed tax measure is explicitly designed to help close.

If implemented, the tax exemption would carry direct implications for Gulf-based trading networks that have historically routed significant volumes of rough diamond trade through established hubs such as Dubai and Antwerp before those stones ultimately reach Indian cutting and polishing centres, primarily concentrated around Surat in Gujarat. A more competitive domestic trading environment within India's Special Notified Zones could, over time, redirect a portion of that rough diamond trading activity directly into the Indian market, a shift that would carry significant implications for the many Indian-origin diamond and jewellery trading houses that have built substantial operations in Dubai specifically because of its longstanding role as a rough stone trading and re-export hub serving the Indian cutting industry. Industry observers note that any such redirection would likely unfold gradually rather than abruptly, given the deep institutional relationships, financing arrangements and logistical infrastructure that Gulf-based trading houses have built up over decades of operation, but the proposed policy shift nonetheless represents one of the more consequential structural changes under discussion within India's gem and jewellery trade policy in recent years.

Beyond the policy discussion, the exhibition itself continues to serve its core function as the primary annual meeting point connecting India's vast and highly fragmented jewellery manufacturing base — which includes everything from large, vertically integrated export houses to smaller family-run workshops specialising in particular craft techniques or regional design traditions — with the global network of buyers, distributors and retailers who source from India each year. For Gulf-based buyers specifically, the concurrent running of the machinery exposition alongside the main jewellery show offers an additional layer of value, allowing manufacturing-focused buyers and investors to evaluate not just finished product but the underlying production technology, automation capability and precision engineering standards that increasingly differentiate competitive Indian manufacturers from lower-cost but less technologically sophisticated regional competitors.

The machinery exposition itself features two hundred forty-nine exhibitors spread across three hundred forty-eight stalls, presenting what organisers describe as the latest advances in jewellery manufacturing automation, precision engineering tooling and production equipment — a segment of the industry that has grown considerably in importance as Indian manufacturers have sought to maintain cost competitiveness against a backdrop of rising labour costs and increasingly stringent quality and sustainability expectations from international buyers, particularly in Western markets where consumer and regulatory scrutiny of jewellery supply chains has intensified considerably over recent years around questions of ethical sourcing, labour conditions and environmental impact.

Speaking at a separate session addressing the exhibition, Chandrashekhar Bawankule, Maharashtra's Minister of Revenue, underscored the state government's continued support for the exhibition's growth, reflecting the significant economic weight the gem and jewellery sector carries within Maharashtra's broader industrial economy, given Mumbai's longstanding role as the commercial and trading headquarters for an industry whose actual manufacturing base is more heavily concentrated in Gujarat but whose trading, exhibition and financial infrastructure has remained centred in Mumbai for generations.

Environmental, social and governance considerations have also become an increasingly prominent theme within the broader gem and jewellery trade over recent years, with international buyers — particularly those serving Western retail markets subject to growing regulatory and consumer scrutiny around supply chain transparency — placing greater emphasis on verifiable ethical sourcing credentials when selecting Indian manufacturing partners. Exhibitors at this year's IIJS Bharat Premiere have increasingly incorporated sustainability and ethical sourcing certification into their marketing materials and buyer presentations, reflecting a broader industry-wide recognition that continued access to premium international markets, including sophisticated Gulf retail chains serving increasingly discerning consumer bases, will depend substantially on the industry's ability to demonstrate credible, verifiable commitments around labour standards, environmental impact and responsible sourcing practices across an often complex and multi-tiered supply chain.

India's dominance of the global diamond cutting and polishing industry is difficult to overstate: the country accounts for the overwhelming majority of the world's cut and polished diamonds by volume, a position built over more than half a century of specialised craft development concentrated heavily around Surat, where an estimated workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands supports an industry that has become deeply intertwined with the state of Gujarat's broader economic identity. That manufacturing dominance has historically coexisted with a comparatively limited role for India within the earlier stages of the diamond value chain, where rough stone mining, sorting and initial trading have remained concentrated in a small number of established global centres, principally in southern Africa for extraction and in Antwerp, Dubai and a handful of other cities for early-stage trading and distribution before stones ultimately reach Indian cutting centres.

For Gulf-based Indian trading houses specifically, that historical division of labour created a durable commercial niche: firms based in Dubai and elsewhere in the UAE built substantial businesses serving as intermediaries, sourcing rough stones from international mining companies and trading networks before channelling them toward Indian cutting and polishing centres, then frequently reacquiring a portion of the finished product for distribution through Gulf retail and re-export channels. That intermediary role has generated substantial wealth and institutional infrastructure for the UAE's Indian-origin jewellery trading community over multiple decades, and any structural shift that redirected a meaningful share of rough diamond trading activity directly into India's own Special Notified Zones would represent a genuine competitive challenge to that established business model, even as it would simultaneously create new opportunities for the same trading families to establish parallel operations within India itself, leveraging existing relationships and expertise in a new geographic and regulatory context.

Beyond the specific rough diamond trading question, IIJS Bharat Premiere's broader significance for UAE-based buyers and exhibitors lies in its function as the primary annual venue for renewing and expanding commercial relationships that, in many cases, span multiple generations of the same trading families on both sides of the India-UAE jewellery trade corridor. Attendees frequently describe the exhibition not merely as a transactional sourcing event, but as an occasion for reinforcing longstanding business and, in many instances, extended family relationships that underpin a trade network built substantially on trust-based commercial arrangements developed over decades, a characteristic that distinguishes the gem and jewellery sector from many other categories of India-Gulf trade where relationships tend to be more transactionally structured and shorter in duration.

The exhibition's scale this year also reflects the broader resilience of India's gem and jewellery export sector amid a challenging period for global trade more broadly, with shipping disruptions, elevated freight costs and periods of regional conflict-related uncertainty having weighed on a number of India's other major export categories over the preceding year. The sector's ability to draw more than fifty thousand visitors and upwards of twenty-seven hundred international buyers despite that broader environment of trade uncertainty speaks to the depth and durability of the commercial relationships underpinning the exhibition, many of which have been built and tested across multiple prior editions and, in the case of Gulf-based buyers specifically, across generations of continuous trading relationships that have proven considerably more resilient to short-term disruption than trade flows built on more recently established or purely transactional commercial ties.

The proposed tax reform's passage through India's Parliament will itself be closely watched by trading communities across the Gulf over the coming months, given the practical implications any final version of the legislation would carry for firms currently structuring their rough diamond sourcing and distribution operations around the existing division of trading activity between Gulf hubs and Indian cutting centres. Industry bodies representing Gulf-based Indian jewellery traders have historically maintained active engagement with Indian policymaking processes affecting the sector, participating in consultations and submitting feedback on proposed regulatory changes through established trade association channels, a pattern of engagement likely to continue as the current tax exemption proposal moves through subsequent legislative stages toward potential implementation.

As the exhibition continues through its closing days, the broader significance of this year's twenty-fifth anniversary edition lies in its dual character: on one hand, a continuation of the established annual rhythm that has connected Indian manufacturers with global buyers, including substantial Gulf and UAE participation, for a quarter-century; and on the other, a moment of potential structural transition, as the proposed rough diamond trading reforms signal India's ambition to capture a larger share of value within the global diamond supply chain rather than continuing to specialise narrowly in cutting and polishing while ceding rough stone trading to established hubs abroad. For the substantial community of Indian-origin jewellery entrepreneurs operating across the Gulf, and in the UAE specifically, that combination of continuity and potential structural change makes this year's IIJS Bharat Premiere a particularly consequential edition to watch, both for the immediate business conducted on the exhibition floor and for the longer-term policy signals shaping where the industry's centre of gravity may sit in the years ahead.