Offtrack: Jaipur: Out Of The Blue

Azure hues are suddenly the preferred colour of the Pink City's gem exporters.

Around 20,000 people in Jaipur are invovled in processing Tanzanite, cutting, shaping and polishing it into fashionable jewels

Around 20,000 people in Jaipur are invovled in processing Tanzanite, cutting, shaping and polishing it into fashionable jewels.

Kate Winslet's was the face that launched a thousand stones. At least Winslet as Rose Dewitt Bukater in the Titanic. The glint from the huge sapphire which a wrinkled Rose consigned to the sea lit up the hearts of people in the US and Europe. Swept by the blue wave, they are queuing up before jewellery stores in the West. But it's the gem exporters of Jaipur who are smiling. Not because they have a cache of the exorbitant sapphire but because they have an affordable and equally lustrous alternative. It's called tanzanite.

Tanzanite is a windfall for the city's gem exporters. When Rajiv Jain of Vaibhav Gems first brought the precious stone to Jaipur in 1992, he couldn't have heard the tills ringing so furiously. He himself was pleasantly surprised to find in his account books for 1998-99 that his tanzanite exports had zoomed to Rs 62 crore, almost double of what he had exported the previous year. Other jewellers in Jaipur -- for ages the biggest global exporters of the green emerald -- have similar bonanza stories to tell. "I knew tanzanite was in demand, but the amazing aspect is that even new exporters are flourishing," says Jain. The raw stone is brought from Arusha in Tanzania -- the world's only source of tanzanite -- and cut, shaped and polished into fashionable stones in Jaipur.

The velvety blue gem, a variant of the mineral zoisite, has become so popular that export of tanzanite has catapulted six-fold in three years, from a mere Rs 20 crore in 1995-96 to over Rs 120 crore in 1998-99. And jewellers, their business antennae tingling with excitement, have cashed in. The group of half a dozen jewellers dealing in tanzanite in Jaipur today includes over 100, and at least a quarter of the city's 80,000-strong workforce in the gemstone industry is involved in processing tanzanite. Around 15 city jewellers have already opened full-fledged offices in Tanzania.

Jaipur's jewellers owe much to the Tucson Fair, a trend-setting gems fair held in the US every year, for the spurt in demand. For two consecutive years -- 1998 and 1999 -- blue was the preferred colour at the fair, and the message went out: it's fashionable to be bedecked in azure. Titanic's lovely blue pendant -- a gift to Rose from her on-board lover Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) -- only added to the mystique. People find tanzanite's ocean blue colour with its better clarity, lustre and depth at a lesser price a better bargain than the traditional favourite, sapphire. The rumour that the mines in Tanzania were flooded and that tanzanite "would soon disappear from earth" made it even more exclusive. "For the first time, we had a stone that sold the moment it was ready, unlike other stocks which often take a year to get exhausted," says Ajay Kalla, who began trading in tanzanite only in September last year after two decades in the gemstone business.

The growing demand has hiked the price of the stone. From Rs 5,000 per carat in 1998, tanzanite fetched as much as Rs 14,000 in March this year. Besides, after the success of Titanic the clamour for tanzanites of bigger sizes has gone up too. Jain once got an order for a tanzanite the size of the Titanic gem -- which would be about 25 carats. Stones of that size are a rarity and Jain has been able to meet only two such demands with 27 carat stones, valued at Rs 3 lakh each.

Tanzanite is even making a linguistic dent in the industry. People no longer say, "Handle carefully, it is like diamond"; it's more in vogue to warn, "Careful, it's as precious as tanzanite." And if someone in the industry drives home in a showy, new car, the conclusion is that he has landed a big order for tanzanite.

But there's an undercurrent of worry too that the bauble might burst and the wits have nicknamed the stone "tensionite". "It is only a fashion trend with the market restricted to the US," says Rashmi Kanta Durlabhji, known as the emerald king. Shyamala Fernandes, chief gemologist at Gem Testing Laboratory, Jaipur, posted a query on the Internet: Do you think the demand for blue is a hype? Most replies she got were in the affirmative. That's not a very good sign for the Pink City jewellers. But till the business blues set in, they can continue raking in the greenbacks.