CaratVasant Mehta, who chaired GJEPC through the crash years, dies at 81
He was the council's vice chairman in 1991-92 and again in 2006-08, chairman from 2008 to 2010, and convenor of its banking, insurance and taxation committee for years after that.
§1Four decades of seats.
Vasant Mehta, a former chairman of India's Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council, has died at 81, reported 18 August 2026. He ran M/s V. Rameshchandra & Co in Mumbai and spent four decades inside the institutions of the Indian diamond trade rather than only in his own business. He was the council's vice chairman in 1991-92, vice chairman again in 2006-08, and chairman from 2008 to 2010. Gaetano Cavalieri, president of the World Jewellery Confederation, described him as "first and foremost a servant of the industry."
The chairmanship dates matter more than an obituary usually allows. Mehta held the council's top seat from 2008 to 2010, which is precisely the window in which the global financial crisis emptied the order books of the world's cutting floor and the credit lines behind them. India polishes the large majority of the world's diamonds by piece, and it does so on bank finance. Running the export council through those two years was a job about liquidity rather than about promotion.
§2Why the dates matter.
That is the thread through the rest of his service. He convened the council's banking, insurance and taxation committee for years, and advised the legal committee of the Bharat Diamond Bourse. Those are the unglamorous seats where the Indian trade's actual constraint sits, and he kept them long after the ceremonial one ended. Internationally he represented Indian interests at the World Diamond Council, the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, the International Diamond Manufacturers Association, the World Jewellery Confederation and the Kimberley Process, and he served the Mumbai Diamond Merchants Association.
Running the export council through those two years was a job about liquidity
§3The committees, not the podium.
This paper carries no independent verification of the date or circumstances of the death beyond the trade report, and does not have a statement from the family or the council. What is on the record is the report, dated 18 August, the age, the firm and the roles with their years, all of which are consistent across the council's own published history of its office holders.
The obituaries of this trade tend to count carats, and this one should count committees. A man who was vice chairman twice, fifteen years apart, and who then spent his post-chairmanship years on banking and taxation rather than on the podium, was doing the part of the work that decides whether Surat's floors have credit in a bad year.
That is the work the Indian industry has always been short of and it is the seat nobody campaigns for. The people now running GJEPC through a genuine downturn in natural stones inherited a machinery he helped build for the last one.
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