It Is now official. Following the Union labour secretary's directive, the Labour department, after a survey of diamond polishing factories in the last three days, has found most of them closed.

Of the 1,000 units covered in the survey, only 360 were working and that too with reduced work hours and low wages.

Assistant Labour Commissioner Kirti Patel said: “We have launched the drive to register the factories and their staff, as well as find some other details. This will help us maintain a data of the factories and we can even contact the factories that are not registered under the Factories Act.”

The Labour department had made nine teams of its officials to find out the number of diamond factories in the city and the number of staff working there. The survey covered units located at Katargam, Varachha, Punagam and Kapodara among others.

The officials collected details of the manpower in the factories, including the staff engaged in clerical work. Further, they compared the present and previous working hours of the diamond polishers as well as their wages.

“We found that a majority of the factory owners have reduced the working hours for polishers to four hours a day. We will resume the drive in the coming days,” Patel added.

The move comes in the wake of Union Labour Secretary Sudha Pillai’s visit to Surat at a time when incidents of suicide are on the rise due to unemployment in the industry.