Mumbai, India – Parneesh Mehta’s diamond jewellery business may be performing much better than many other companies around the world suffering from the crushing force of lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
But the entrepreneur based in India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, says that is little consolation for the revenue he has lost because of tariff hikes on the gems and jewellery sector in his biggest export market – the United States.
In April 2019, the US withdrew India and Turkey from its Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), an import duty exemption on certain goods – including Mehta’s jewels – that require a lot of manpower to make, from developing countries.
“That really hurt us,” Mehta told Al Jazeera. “We had to adjust our prices for some of our clients. For others, we dropped the quality of the gems.”
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