03 Journey 1960 – 2026
Six decades, in order
A career inside a family firm is difficult to date, because the important transitions rarely announce themselves.
What can be dated is set out below: the founding of the house, the moves that changed its shape, the commitments it signed, and the recognition that arrived late in a working life.
1960
A firm is founded in Mumbai
Arunkumar Mehta and his uncle, Bhanuchandra Bhansali, establish B. Arunkumar & Co. It is the business that will become Rosy Blue — and the house into whose third generation Russell Mehta is born.
1970s
Antwerp
The company establishes its headquarters in Antwerp, the historic centre of the world’s rough diamond trade. It remains headquartered there today, with the Indian companies run from Mumbai.
2005
Responsible Jewellery Council
Rosy Blue becomes a founding and certified member of the Responsible Jewellery Council — the body that sets and audits ethical, human rights, social and environmental standards across the jewellery supply chain.
2007
His father is honoured
Arunkumar Mehta receives the Lifetime Achievement Award at the India Gem & Jewellery Awards. Seventeen years later the same award will go to his son — a coincidence remarked upon from the stage on the night.
2008
United Nations Global Compact
The company becomes a signatory to the UN Global Compact, committing to its principles on human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption.
2010
The Rosy Blue Foundation
The group establishes its foundation, with a deliberate brief: to back inventive approaches to social problems rather than to fund conventional charity. Russell Mehta serves on its board.
2013
A case study at INSEAD
INSEAD publishes Russell Mehta at Rosy Blue: A Diamantaire for Life, by Balagopal Vissa, Rajeshree Naik and Indira Pant — a teaching case tracing how he built his own professional networks while running one of the largest diamond companies in the world.
2015
Council office, and two education programmes
He begins a two-year term as Vice Chairman of the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council. In the same year the Rosy Blue Foundation helps establish the Mumbai chapter of Mentor Together, which pairs mentors with two hundred disadvantaged students in its first year, and supports the launch of ConnectFor, a platform matching volunteers to non-profits.
2020
A generation passes; a seat abroad
The family loses both Arunkumar Ramnikbhai Mehta (1940–2020), on 14 June, and Ramnikbhai Rajmalbhai Mehta (1920–2020) — the two men whose names the family scholarship now carries. In the same period Russell Mehta joins the board of the World Diamond Council, serving until 2022.
2022
Board of Governors, GIA
In August he is appointed a governor of the Gemological Institute of America — the body whose diamond diploma he had taken as a young man in Santa Monica, and whose grading language the whole trade now speaks.
2024
Lifetime Achievement Award
On 30 March, at the 50th India Gem & Jewellery Awards in Mumbai, the GJEPC presents him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in the golden jubilee year of the awards. It is handed over by the Governor of Maharashtra, Ramesh Bais, and by Mukesh Ambani.
2026
In conversation
On 8 January he appears in Coffee with CKM, in conversation with Dr. Chetan Kumar Mehta of Laxmi Diamonds — a public discussion of growth strategy for Rosy Blue and for the Indian gem and jewellery sector, and of the less comfortable parts of a leadership record.
On the arc of it
Two men have now taken the same award, seventeen years apart, for work done in the same house.
The 2007 award went to Arunkumar Mehta; the 2024 award to his son. Both were given by the GJEPC.