Are Your Jaipur Gems Fake?
Jaipur’s reputed gem market suffers a trust deficit after resin-treated emeralds are passed off as natural
Jaipur’s reputed gem market suffers a trust deficit after resin-treated emeralds are passed off as natural.
Over the past few months, several cases have emerged of resin-filled emeralds bought from Johri Bazaar, Jaipur’s legendary gem market, being passed off as natural and later valued at onefifth the price they were sold at. Trade sources say a handful of jewellers and traders have profited in crores of rupees through the racket. The Jaipur Jewellers Association estimates Rs 200 crore worth of such emeralds have been sold in the past one year. Of these, over Rs 100 crore worth of emeralds have been sent back from the international market for being of substandard quality.
The first alarm was the arrest of jeweller Govind Johri in Delhi in October 2011. He had sold extremely poor quality gemstones Kiran Nadar, art collector and wife of Shiv Nadar, founder-chairman of the HCL group. According to the police, Kiran, who has been buying precious stones from Johri for more than a decade, decided to get some of the gemstones tested. She found that not only were some gemstones of poor quality, but some gemstones were also fake.
Kiran’s public relations firm, Six Degrees PR, and her HCL office did not respond to the queries mailed by INDIA
TODAY in October and then again in April. At that time, jewellers in Jaipur termed hers “an isolated case”. INDIA TODAY found out that soon after, some wellknown traders and jewellers got their emeralds tested. In December 2011, Gem Testing Laboratory ( GTL), run by the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council in Jaipur, noticed a significant rise in the number of such resin-treated emeralds in the market. Most of them were found to have originated from Zambia in Africa. GTL officials said between January and March, about one-fifth of 1,800 emeralds of an average size of five carats sold at Rs 3 lakh were found to have been treated with resin when tested. These fillers tend to hide fractures in the stone and enhance the look. But in a few months, the gems lose their shine and develop cracks while being set in jew- ellery. Officials gave the example of a 114-carat emerald bought in March by a local customer for Rs 1.75 crore. The gemstone was found to be full of cracks and had also lost its lustre.
“There is an unparalleled trust deficit in our trade today because of this large-scale cheating. Never before have resin-treated emeralds been sold as natural ones,” says jeweller Om Prakash Dangayach, owner of Friends International in Jaipur. He claims he is a victim of the racket. He bought an emerald for Rs 1.8 lakh and sold it to a
client in Hong Kong in October 2011. In January, the buyer returned the gemstone with the complaint that its quality had deteriorated. “In another case, a Rs 5-lakh emerald looked like a Rs 50,000 one in just two months,” he says. His estimate is that Rs 125 crore worth emeralds have already been returned to jewellers in the past two months.
However, Jaipur Jewellers Association President Nirmal Kumar Bardiya told INDIA TODAY that it was not such a major issue. “There is much ado about nothing,” he said. “It is a deal between two persons and one is free to return the goods if he is not satisfied.” But there have been cases where traders have refused to refund money, leaving the buyer with a flawed gem. In a meeting on March 26, the association made it mandatory for members to declare if an emerald had been treated, and if so, with what material.
Rajiv Jain, chairman of the Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council, says he has received no official complaints so far. He says buyers should get a gemstone tested if they are suspicious. It costs Rs 500 to get an emerald tested. Market sources say jewellers’ bodies are taking advantage of the fact that most buyers refuse to go on record about the racket as a large number of deals are kept off the account books. Ajay Kala, a jeweller and gemstone trader who is the secretary of the Jaipur Chamber of Commerce and Industry, points to a lack of transparency in the gem trade.
A March 2012 GTL circular issued by Deputy Director Gagan Choudhary says, “The fracture filling of emerald is causing sleepless nights to everyone associated with the emerald trade. Emerald buyers are losing confidence because of the incomplete disclosure of treatment done.” The circular was drafted after the number of emeralds tested at GTL rose to 600 a month from the average 80 between 2009 and 2011. “There used to be hardly one case of resin-filled emerald detected in a month earlier,” says Choudhary. In January alone, GTL detected 150.
Often, even the rough form from which the emeralds are extracted had been treated with resin, Choudhary says, so even jewellers were unable to judge the extent of fractures. As a result, it is only when heat-sensitive emeralds are being set in jewellery that the fillings are discovered. Unlike diamonds, there has been no grading of gemstones. “We must work to establish parameters to grade different gemstones. Lack of transparency has resulted in this scam,” says Kala. Jewellers and gemstone traders’ bodies have not taken any initiative as yet.
Gem testing experts said that given the number of stages and hands a stone passes through, it is not always possible to identify the point at which filling is done. In Jaipur, everything that glitters is certainly not genuine emeralds.