Government to overhaul gold jewellery standards
NEW DELHI: India is overhauling its gold-jewellery standards to acquire the status of a global business hub, with a fresh federal push to provide unique hallmarking ID to ornaments in the world’s second-largest gold market, a top official has said.
The Bureau of Indian Standards, the country’s quality regulator, said the country had achieved a target of providing hallmarked unique identifiers for 10 million gold sets within a “short span”.
The unique ID enables consumers to independently verify the genuineness and quality of gold jewellery, which improves consumer transparency while buying a commodity that is notoriously hard to judge.
“The hallmarking scheme is turning out to be grand success with more than 1 crore pieces of Jewellery hallmarked in a quick time and over 90,000 jewellers registered for the system,” BIS’S director general Pramod Kumar Tiwari said.
The push to overhaul norms is expected to help revive demand for gold that slumped to record lows in the country since the 2020 pandemic. Total purchases tanked an 30% in 2020 from the 690 tonne bought in 2019, according to estimates of the All-india Gem and Jewellery Domestic Council.
Although India is the world’s second-largest gold consumer market after China, much of the trade is opaque and consumers often can’t verify what they are being sold in terms of purity.
In an effort to formalise the gold business, hallmarking by jewellers is now mandatory in 256 districts of the country.
The gems and jewellery sector contributes nearly 7% to India’s gross domestic product and employs nearly 4 million people, according to data from the Confederation of Indian Industry.
Official data show the number of registered jewellers for hallmarking of gold as per standards laid down by BIS rose to 91,603. Jewellery pieces received for hallmarking and hallmarked since July 1 to August 20 rose to record 10 million during this period.
The top official of BIS, a body under the consumer affairs ministry, also said the body was not into the business of tracking business-to-business movement of jewellery and neither were jewellers required to upload details of sales. “There is no such requirement on behalf of jewellers,” explained Tiwari.
Tiwari said that the government was constantly reviewing the functioning of hallmarking centres.