Hyderabad: All that glitters is not gold and this may be especially true for Telangana as it has the least number of hallmarking centres for gold in the South India. With just 10 centres to give BIS approval to gold jewellery in TS most of the gold in the city may not be pure.
“Hallmarking centres are set up on demand. In the city it is not much of a trend as hallmarking units say they do not have enough customers and jewellers say there aren’t enough centres to get their goods hallmarked,” said Mr S. Bhowal, the head of the Hyderabad branch of the Bureau of Indian Standards.
Other southern states like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and AP have far more BIS approved hallmarking centres with Tamil Nadu having the highest number of 58 centres.
The existing hallmarking centres cater to about 396 jewellers who have registered with BIS to procure hallmarked gold. But Hyderabad alone has over 2,300 shops according to the legal metrology department. Moreover, for the few who are registered, that can't stop them from selling non-standardised gold. This is because at present there is no rule that all gold jewellery manufacturers have to standardise the gold they sell. Only 109 items require the mandatory ISI mark from BIS.
“It may be a practice to sell impure gold with incorrect fineness but consumers do not file complaints with BIS. So it is hard to catch defaulters,” says Mr Bhowal.
The BIS gives hallmarks for 22, 18 and 14 carat gold based on the amount of gold present. Without the BIS mark it is easy to dupe customers. The customer may realise the difference in purity only at the time of resale.
But the jewellery association says that many consumers are demanding approved gold. “Big jewellers use BIS hallmarking as their selling tool and many consumers go only for standardised ones. So very few small shops are getting their jewellery hallmarked,” says Mr Puroshotam Aggarwal of the Twin Cities Jewellers Association.
