Mehta's involvement in the 1992 Indian securities scam (about ₹30,000 crore (equivalent to ₹2.3 trillion or US$27 billion in 2023)) led him to gain infamy for market manipulation.

[4][5] Harshad Shantilal Mehta[6] was born on 29 July 1954,[7] at Paneli Moti, Rajkot district, in a Gujarati Jain family.

[11] Mehta completed his B.Com in 1976 from Lala Lajpatrai College, Bombay and worked a number of odd jobs for the next eight years.

[6] In his early life, Mehta did jobs, often related to sales, including selling hosiery, cement, and sorting diamonds.

Mehta started his career as a salesperson in the Mumbai office of New India Assurance Company Limited (NIACL).

Over a period of ten years, beginning 1980, he served in positions of increasing responsibility at a series of brokerage firms.

By 1990, he had risen to a position of prominence in the Indian securities industry, with the media (including popular magazines such as Business Today) touting him as "Amitabh Bachchan of the Stock market".

[6] Mehta founded Grow More Research and Asset Management, with the financial assistance of associates, when the BSE auctioned a broker's card [6] and actively started to trade in 1986.

The price of shares in the cement company eventually rose from ₹200 to nearly ₹9,000 due to a massive spate of buying from a set of brokers including Mehta.

[14] In criminal indictments later brought by the authorities, it was alleged that Mehta and his associates then undertook a much broader scheme, which resulted in manipulating the rise in the Bombay Stock Exchange.

However, they were expected to post profits and to retain a certain ratio (threshold) of their assets in government fixed interest bonds.

The BR serves as a receipt from the selling bank, and also promises that the buyer will receive the securities they have paid for at the end of the terms.

Subsequently, it transpired that Citibank, brokers like Pallav Sheth and Ajay Kayan, industrialists like Aditya Birla, Hemendra Kothari, a number of politicians, and the RBI Governor S.Venkitaramanan all had allowed or facilitated Mehta's market manipulation.