Surat, India – In 2018, Alpesh Bhai enrolled his three-year-old daughter in an English-language private school in Surat. This was something he never imagined possible while growing up in his village in the Indian state of Gujarat, where his family survived on small fields of fennel, castor and cumin, with their earnings barely enough to cover basic needs.He had studied in a public school, where, he recalled, “teachers were a rarity, and English almost didn’t exist”.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list“Maybe if I knew English, I would have been some government worker. Who knows?”, he said, referring to the dream of a majority of Indians, as government jobs come with tenure and benefits.His finances improved once he joined the diamond cutting industry in Surat, a city perched along India’s Arabian Sea coast, where nearly 80 percent of the world’s diamonds are cut and polished. Monthly earnings of 35,000 rupees ($390) for the first time brought Alpesh a sense of stability, and with it, the means to give his children the education he never had.“I was determined that at least my children would get the kind of private education I was deprived of,” he said.But that dream did not last. The first disruption to business came with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine …
