Sitting in the lush garden of his swanky bungalow, Chandrakant Sanghavi, who runs a Rs 500-crore diamond cutting unit, yells to his gardener not to waste water. Having lived through a famine and near penury in Deesa in north Gujarat before moving to Surat in 1971, water is as priceless as diamonds to him. "The amount of water we flush in our bathrooms today was enough for the whole day for my family of eight when I was growing up,' he says. "Had it not been for the severe water crisis back home, we would never have shifted to Surat.' Believe it, Saurashtra and north Gujarat's bone dry wells have in a way given birth to Surat's diamond industry. Migrants from these parched regions came to Surat, put their heart and soul into the diamond industry. Today, they control the Rs-50,000 crore industry. Mathur Savani, another diamond baron, migrated from Bhavnagar in the 70's. The 13 bighas of land his father owned in the drought-prone village could not feed the family of nine. "We would have died of poverty and water scarcity had we stayed back,' he says. Today, he is the president of Saurashtra Jaldhara Trust, an NGO actively working to reach water to the parched lands back home. The trust has constructed hundreds of checkdams across Saurashtra and north Gujarat. "Without water, we could do nothing with the fields except wait out death. So, they brought all that energy to Surat and turned it into the fastest growing city in the country,' says Govind Dholakia who came from drought-prone Amreli in the 70's.