Where the attention goes

As Managing Director, Russell Mehta is responsible for the Rosy Blue group’s companies in India. The principal work of four decades has been to convert a family-managed diamond business into a professionally run company — delegated authority, systems that outlast individuals, and governance that a partner or a bank can read.

Rosy Blue trades rough diamonds and manufactures polished stones, alongside precious and semi-precious gems and jewellery. It has been headquartered in Antwerp since the 1970s and is a certified De Beers sightholder. The wider group’s interests extend into retail, media, real estate, financial services and clean energy.

• Founded 1960 as B. Arunkumar & Co., Mumbai
• Headquartered in Antwerp, with around a dozen offices across several countries
• De Beers sightholder — certified for direct rough supply

The diamond trade depends on bodies that can speak for it, certify it and discipline it. Mehta has given time to several, in India and internationally — work that is unpaid, slow, and largely invisible to anyone outside the industry.

• Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council — Vice Chairman, 2015–2017. India’s apex body for gem and jewellery exports.
• World Diamond Council — board member, 2020–2022. The industry body built around the Kimberley Process.
• Gemological Institute of America — Board of Governors, appointed August 2022.
• Bharat Diamond Bourse — past member of the management committee.
• Young Presidents’ Organization — member.

Rosy Blue made its formal commitments before the market demanded them. It was a founding and certified member of the Responsible Jewellery Council in 2005, which subjects it to third-party audit against standards covering human rights, labour, environmental practice and business ethics across the chain of custody. In 2008 it became a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact.

For a house that both buys rough and sells polished goods, these are not decorative undertakings. They govern where stones may be bought, what a supplier must be able to evidence, and what the company is prepared to certify to the retailer at the other end.

• 2005 — founding and certified member, Responsible Jewellery Council
• 2008 — signatory, United Nations Global Compact

The family’s giving is concentrated on education, and much of it returns to the district the family came from. Russell Mehta is Chairman of the Vidyamandir Trust in Palanpur and a trustee of the Banaskantha District Kelavani Mandal. He chairs the Governance Council of the ARRA Scholarship, the fund named for his father, Arunkumar Ramnikbhai Mehta, and his grandfather, Ramnikbhai Rajmalbhai Mehta.

The Rosy Blue Foundation, on whose board he sits, was set up in 2010 to back inventive approaches rather than conventional charity — and its record reflects that brief.

• Mentor Together — the Mumbai chapter, established with Foundation support in 2015, paired mentors with two hundred disadvantaged students in its first year.
• ConnectFor — a volunteer-matching platform launched in 2015; by the end of 2022 it had mobilised more than 56,000 volunteers with 740 non-profits.
• Teacher training — a programme run with the Vidyamandir Trust across seven schools in Palanpur.
• Mentor Me India — mentoring for street children and vulnerable young people.
• PNP Education Society — support for the construction of the Holy Child school, serving around 680 students.
• ArtShala — volunteer artists creating murals in government schools across India.