On October 15 last year, Ravi Gaikwad, a 20-year-old office assistant working at Aarshit Gems in Mumbai’s diamond hub, Panchratna building in Opera House in south Mumbai, pulled off a daring heist. When his boss was locking up the office, he ducked under the table and stayed out of sight. Till 4 the next morning, he slept peacefully in the office. Then he woke up, broke open a drawer and stole diamonds and other valuables worth Rs 11 crore and escaped through an office window. He walked nonchalantly past the gate; the watchman guarding the gate did not even look his way.

Gaikwad was eventually caught and most of the diamonds were recovered. But the incident has once again sent a frisson of alarm in the diamond merchant community which is concentrated in three buildings in the Opera House area — Prasad Chambers, Panchratna Building and Shreeji Building. The heavily congested area was recently made a pedestrian-only zone to minimise the security risk to the huge store of diamonds that the merchants deal with here. But going by Gaikwad’s audacious robbery, security obviously remains a big concern even now.

That’s why the diamond merchants of Mumbai are waiting impatiently for the launch of the Bharat Diamond Bourse. Coming up in the Bandra-Kurla complex on a huge, 8,00,000 square feet plot of land leased from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, the bourse is slated to be one of the most modern, high-security, diamond trading hubs in Asia and will be India’s answer to the famed Antwerp Diamond Centre in Belgium. Once complete, it will provide traders from India as well as elsewhere a safe, single-window operation facility with a dedicated customs house for quick clearances.

Conceived way back in 1992, the bourse, which is set to open in early 2009, will also have a cutting- edge security system. You sense that the moment you walk into the sprawling 22-acre complex comprising nine buildings.

SAFE AND SOUND: (From above) A vault at the Bharat Diamond Bourse, and buildings in the complex. Pix: Gajanan Dudhalkar

After you state the purpose of your visit, a lady guard whisks you off to a make-shift administration office. As you wait in the foyer, CCTVs follow your every move. Later, a building manager tells you that the security for the Bharat Diamond Bourse is going to be so tight that occupants of one floor or a wing will not be able to enter another part of the complex as each will have its own turnstile and security access. Disbursement of passwords and access codes will be strictly monitored. Plans are afoot to install several metal barricades and 24X7 electronic vigil. At the main foyer, visitors and employees will be frisked while an x-ray machine will check their handbags.That’s not all. A team of crack security personnel will patrol the complex. A number of vaults are also being set up in the building where merchants will be able to stock their diamond hoards.

Mumbai has over 5,000 diamond merchants and about 2,500 of them plan to shift to the Bharat Diamond Bourse once it is ready for operation. But if you ask Hardik Hundiya, editor of Hira-Manek, a trade magazine, he will tell you that though the security may be tight within the bourse complex, “it is not safe en route. The place is close to the airport, anything can happen.” In fact, on October 14 this year, diamonds worth Rs 4.5 crore were stolen from Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport by loaders when the consignment arrived on a Thai Airways flight. Though the Mumbai police were once again able to crack the case, the city’s lawkeepers continue to worry about the issue of security for diamonds. The D.B. Marg police, which handles most of the crimes in the Opera House area, feel that the diamond merchants themselves are quite lax about their own security.

In yet another incident, for instance, in November last year, a carpenter stole sachets of diamonds worth Rs 4.5 crore from a secret drawer in the Grant Road residence of jeweller Pratap Zaveri, who owns the jewellery store Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri. The thief, Divesh Borse, was apprehended while he was spending outrageous amounts of money in a beer bar and so caught the attention of a police informer.

Naturally, such thefts can well and truly spook India’s thriving diamond industry. Though India does not produce its own rough diamonds, diamond exports is a Rs-17,000 crore industry. Mumbai’s diamond merchants are really the uncrowned billionaires of the city and own some of the most expensive properties in and around Mumbai. Most of the diamonds are cut and polished in Surat and transported by private couriers called angadias. The angadias carry Rs 100 crore worth of diamonds every day from Surat to Mumbai.

The constant robberies and the risk involved in transporting diamonds from Surat to Mumbai prompted the setting up of small scale polishing units at some of Mumbai’s northwestern suburbs like Dahisar and Malad.

Sources say that the diamond industry in Mumbai is not very transparent — which is one reason it is beset with security and other problems. Hawala transactions are said to be very common too. The fact that the Bharat Diamond Bourse has been over 15 years in the making (it was originally meant to be finished by 1996) is also due to the general mismanagement in the system, say those in the know. In fact, diamond merchants point out that had the bourse got operational before, they would have increased their business by at least 25 per cent by now. The bourse’s proximity to Mumbai’s airport and fast-track customs clearance system would have saved time and made for efficient business practices, they explain.

But even though the bourse is now nearly ready, sceptics are already wondering if it will be all that it promises to be. The diamond merchant community of Mumbai belongs to two main groups — the Palampuri Jains and the Patels (primarily from Kathiawad in Saurashtra). While most of the Palampuri Jains have secured offices in the new bourse, many of the Patels say they prefer to stick it out in the Opera House area.

Even those who have invested huge amounts of money in getting offices in the new bourse are now wondering whether it was a wise choice. After all, it is Surat that takes pride of place in India’s diamond industry, thanks to its thousands of diamond polishing units. If the Surat International Airport comes up as planned, many diamond merchants would want to shift to Surat anyway. Says Hardik Hundiya, “If Surat gets its own international airport soon, the money that the diamond merchants invested in the Bharat Diamond Bourse will not be worth it.”

Meanwhile, at the bourse work is going on in full throttle. In fact, traders have been told to start doing up their interiors. The offices range from as small as 500 square feet to magnum-sized ones. And no, Bollywood producer, diamond merchant and sometime jail bird Bharat Shah does not top the list of the top 10 luminaries at the bourse. There are other big names — such as B. Arun Kumar, Blue Star, S. Vinod Kumar, Sanghvi Exports, Geetanjali and so on — who have huge offices in the complex. After all, when diamonds are at stake, big is always beautiful.