PALI KHAN (India): Mangaldas lives in a wooden hut, sheltered by a plastic sheet, and lights fires at night to keep away the tigers. But he feels like a king.

“We lead a lavish life here. We sleep on diamonds. We walk on diamonds,” he says.

Mangaldas is a watchman, guarding what some hope may be one of the world’s biggest diamond deposits, buried under thickly forested wild terrain in the remote interior of central India.

Just past his hut, and beyond the small watering hole where a tiger left a pugmark when it drank earlier in the day, the path leads up to a numbered stone marking the presence of kimberlite, the seam in which diamonds are embedded.

According to the government in the central state of Chhattisgarh, the diamond mines here could turn out to be among the top 22 in the world.

“Chhattisgarh is nestling atop the world’s largest kimberlite area,” it says.

The government has brought in international companies to survey the area — though in what is a very secretive business it declined to give out the names of those involved.

The diamonds first appeared at least a decade ago, washed out of the soil by the monsoon rains and collected by local people for sale into an illegal trade. Now the government is trying to create some order and has already fenced off many areas.

But politics, bureaucracy and a wariness about allowing foreigners to exploit India’s mineral wealth means that progress is slow — creating a bizarre contrast between rural people living a life of poverty above an abundance of mineral wealth.

This is virgin terrain, populated by tribal villagers whose lifestyle has barely changed since Rudyard Kipling used the neighbouring region as inspiration for The Jungle Book.

In the village of Pali Khan, the people have little idea of how their lives may change, but are impatient to enjoy the wealth of the diamonds.

Barnuram, a wizened old man with a walking stick, says he found a diamond in his field about 10 years ago.

Barnuram took it to a village nearby where he says a shopkeeper took one look at it and without hesitating exchanged it for 3,000 rupees ($63) and five kilograms (11 lbs) of rice.—Reuters