A commerce graduate who learned the stones

Origins

Rosy Blue was founded in 1960 in Mumbai as B. Arunkumar & Co., set up by Arunkumar Mehta together with his uncle, Bhanuchandra Bhansali. Like a great many of the families who built India’s diamond trade, the Mehtas trace their roots to Palanpur in the Banaskantha district of Gujarat — a connection the family has never treated as merely sentimental, and one that still shapes where a good deal of its philanthropy goes.

Russell Mehta is the son of Arunkumar Ramnikbhai Mehta (1940–2020) and the grandson of Ramnikbhai Rajmalbhai Mehta (1920–2020) — the third generation of the Mehta and Bhansali families to run the house. Being born into a trade is not the same as being able to practise it, and the distinction is one he has been careful about for most of his working life.

Training

He read commerce at the University of Mumbai, graduating from Sydenham College. He then took his technical training at the Gemological Institute of America in Santa Monica, completing the Institute’s diamond coursework and earning its diploma in diamonds.

It is an unremarkable-looking pair of credentials that turns out to explain a good deal. The commerce degree gave him the language of a company; the GIA diploma gave him the language of the goods. Very few people in any industry are fluent in both, and the ones who are tend to end up running things.

The company

As Managing Director of Rosy Blue (India) Pvt. Ltd., he is responsible for the group’s companies in India. Over more than four decades in the trade, his central achievement has been structural rather than transactional: the conversion of a family-managed diamond business into a professionally run company, with the systems, governance and delegated authority that implies.

Rosy Blue itself has grown into one of the largest diamond and gemstone businesses in the world. It has been headquartered in Antwerp since the 1970s, is a certified De Beers sightholder, and today operates across a dozen offices in several countries. The wider group’s interests reach beyond stones into retail, media, real estate, financial services and clean energy.

Service to the trade

The diamond industry is unusual in how much of its business still moves on trust, and unusually dependent, in consequence, on the bodies that set its standards. Mehta has served in several of them. He was Vice Chairman of the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council from 2015 to 2017, sat on the board of the World Diamond Council from 2020 to 2022, and has been a member of the GIA Board of Governors since August 2022. He has also served on the management committee of the Bharat Diamond Bourse, and is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization.

Beyond the business

The family’s philanthropy is organised, not occasional. The Rosy Blue Foundation, established in 2010, was deliberately built to back inventive solutions to social problems rather than to write conventional cheques. Mehta sits on its board.

He is Chairman of the Vidyamandir Trust in Palanpur and a trustee of the Banaskantha District Kelavani Mandal, both of them educational bodies in the district his family comes from. He also chairs the Governance Council of the ARRA Scholarship, the education fund named for his father and grandfather.