PM Modi Wears This Watch: Inside Jaipur Watch Company, India’s Rising ₹80 Crore Brand
When photographs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi began circulating in November 2025, the detail that stopped people was not a Swiss logo. It was a tiger walking across a coin that looked older than the Republic itself. The watch on his wrist was the Roman Baagh from Jaipur Watch Company — a homegrown micro-luxury brand that puts real pieces of Indian history under sapphire crystal. The company did not stage the moment. Founder Gaurav Mehta has said he learned of it only after someone called to say the timepiece looked familiar. Because the Prime Minister wears his watch on the inside of the wrist, identification took a hunt through official photo galleries. The brand’s logo and distinctive lugs gave it away.
That sighting, and later appearances including the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026, turned a Jaipur workshop story into a national conversation about what “Made in India” luxury can look like when it is actually worn at the top.
A 1947 coin, not a printed tiger
The Roman Baagh is built around an original one-rupee coin from 1947 — among the last coins minted under British rule, produced only in the second half of 1946 and through 1947. The walking tiger on that coin is not decoration applied later. The coin is the dial. Jaipur Watch Company sells the idea that Indian luxury should carry an object from the country’s past, not a motif copied from it.
The rest of the watch is contemporary accessible luxury. The case is 43 mm, cut from 316L stainless steel. The movement is a Japanese Miyota 8215 automatic with a 42-hour power reserve. Sapphire crystal covers the front and the exhibition case back. Water resistance is 5 ATM — enough for rain and shallow swimming, not a dive tool. A 22 mm leather strap finishes it. Official listings put the Roman Baagh and its Devanagari and gold-plated siblings at around ₹55,000 to ₹60,000, inclusive of taxes. Variants use Roman or Devanagari numerals on gold-tone or steel cases. Later Baagh editions have used half-rupee coins from the same years and even hand-engraved or diamond-set versions at much higher prices.
For a leader who talks constantly about heritage and self-reliance, the symbolism is almost too neat: Independence-year metal, a tiger in motion, assembled in India, priced where an ambitious professional can actually buy it.
The man who sold a BMW to make watches
Gaurav Mehta did not come from a watchmaking family. He had an MBA in risk management and ran entertainment zones in Jaipur malls. He collected coins and international watches. In 2012, while taking apart a quartz piece, he found an old British-India coin and set it into a dial. Friends reacted. In January 2013 he founded Jaipur Watch Company after selling his BMW and pooling about ₹30 lakh. The first line, the Imperial Collection, used pre-Independence coins as faces.
The first decade was slow. Mehta has said it took nearly nine years simply to survive — customers were not ready, manufacturers were unhelpful, retailers were uninterested. The company reached break-even only after years of small batches and corporate orders. It calls itself India’s first micro-luxury watch brand: limited runs, heritage objects on the dial, prices that start in the tens of thousands rather than lakhs reserved for Swiss names.
In Season 2 of Shark Tank India, Mehta asked for ₹50 lakh for 2% equity — a ₹25 crore valuation. All five sharks walked. They liked the story and worried about brand clarity, scale, and whether the product sat in luxury or in costume jewellery with a mechanical heart. The episode still became a marketing windfall. Website traffic jumped for months. The practical lesson Mehta took from the panel was retail. Stores in Delhi and Jaipur followed. Anupam Mittal later ordered watches; one account says a piece was made for Amitabh Bachchan.
Watches as portable museums
Jaipur Watch Company’s catalogue is a short course in Indian material culture. Coin watches remain the signature. Stamp watches set vintage postage under glass. Other lines have used miniature painting, peacock-feather texture, stone mosaic, khadi, and architectural fragments from Jaipur — chhatris, city gates, palace geometry. In 2026 the brand pushed further with Premium Baagh and Gates of India, and began putting Mehta’s own name on a designer-led collection. Entry pieces can sit near ₹20,000–₹35,000. Artistic and gem-set Baagh watches climb past ₹1.5 lakh and, in diamond-studded versions, toward ₹3 lakh.
The honest caveat from watch forums has not disappeared. Many pieces use workhorse Japanese automatics, not in-house Indian or Swiss calibres. At ₹60,000, enthusiasts argue you are paying for the coin, the story, and the finishing — not for haute horology. Mehta’s reply has been consistent: the brand is not trying to beat Rolex on the movement. It is trying to put India on the wrist in a way a printed “Make in India” logo cannot. He has spoken of eventually developing Indian-made movements. That is still ambition, not inventory.
From a one-man workshop to an ₹80 crore target
Numbers around privately held brands always need a grain of salt, but the published trajectory is steep. After years in single-digit crores, Jaipur Watch Company has cited roughly ₹10 crore, then ₹25 crore, with Mehta saying in July 2026 that the firm was “on track to do ₹80 crore this financial year.” Last year it sold around 10,000 watches and hoped to cross 20,000. The team has grown from one person to 60-plus. About 70% of sales still come online; orders arrive from more than 40 countries, including Switzerland and Japan. Physical retail has expanded to about 15 stores, with 19 planned, a presence at Jaipur’s Rambagh Palace, and first international shops eyed in Dubai and Sri Lanka. The longer goal Mehta repeats is 100 stores and a brand that lasts beyond his lifetime.
Celebrity wear helped before the Prime Minister and exploded after. Amitabh Bachchan, other film names, cricketers, and Ed Sheeran — who wore a Devanagari Baagh on The Great Indian Kapil Show after a fan handed him one — gave the brand a cultural life that advertising could not buy.
What the wrist actually said
Prime Ministers’ accessories are never only personal. Modi already mixes Swiss minimalism with Indian cloth and craft. Choosing a ₹60,000 Jaipur coin watch, and wearing it again at a global AI event, told a simple story: indigenous luxury no longer has to hide behind imported names to look serious. Searches and enquiries spiked. Waiting lists grew. For every critic who still sees a Miyota in a story-led case, there is a buyer who wants 1947 on the wrist and does not care that the rotor is Japanese.
Jaipur Watch Company is not India’s Rolex. It is something narrower and, for the moment, more interesting — a company that treated coins, stamps and palace architecture as raw material, survived a decade of indifference, left Shark Tank without a cheque, and then watched the Prime Minister strap on its bestseller. The tiger on that 1947 rupee was minted at the edge of empire. Thirteen years after a car was sold to fund the first workshop, the same tiger is keeping time on the most photographed wrist in the country. That is the product. The rest is whether Indian luxury can keep the story honest as the revenue target climbs toward ₹80 crore.
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