Bengaluru: Jewellers of around 350 associations across India will go on a “token strike” Monday against the “arbitrarily implemented” hallmarking process of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).
According to the new hallmarking rules, that came into effect in June, jewellers are only allowed to sell gold items of 14,18 and 22 carats and are required to hallmark their products. In case they don’t, they face a penalty — pay five times the cost of the product sold or face up to a year of imprisonment.
“BIS from being a standard and quality assurance institution is playing the role of a revenue department with gems and jewellery industry becoming a very soft target for them. Jewellers have waited for almost 2 months with complications piling up and impractical laws resulting in industry collapse,” said a press release by the National Task Force on Hallmarking, consisting of more than 300 associations and federations of the gems and jewellery industry.
The jewellers who are protesting have no problem with the mandatory hallmarking of products as such but are unhappy with the process which they feel is lengthy and complicated.
Also read: To cancel or not to cancel curry — food blogger raises a storm with Instagram post
The controversy
According to the press release, the current legislation has led to several problems including an increase in time taken to hallmark the product.
“Earlier also they (hallmarking centres) would take one jewellery from a lot and would scrub, cut, melt the metal to ascertain its purity. In the new Hallmarking Unique ID (HUID) that process remains the same but the jeweller needs to put the weight and the detail of each item in the portal and then send it to the hallmark centre….that is one lengthy process,” Dinesh Jain, member, National Task Force on Hallmarking and director Gem & Jewellery Skill Council of India, told ThePrint.
He added that while this was possible for big and medium players, jewellers in rural areas who do not possess computers are unable to follow through with the regulation.
Additionally, jewellers log the composition of a product — that is, they enter the silver, gold content within a product. “This is not the process where they’re actually looking at the purity of the items, this is just an administrative process…this takes about 4-5 days which has slowed down the hallmarking process,” Jain added.
Yogesh Singhal, President All India Bullion & Jewellers Federation, said, “Hallmarking should be done…but in the name of this, the UID that they have implemented has made accountants out of us…if it takes 5-6 days for the process. My manufactured goods are just staying unsold for that time.”
Errors during the hallmarking process can lead to the same product getting two IDs or assigning one ID to multiple products. That there is a limited number of hallmarking centres is another hassle.
The penal and criminal consequences on the jeweller — as punishment for jewellery not being hallmarked — will lead to “Inspector Raj”, the release added.
Pramod Kumar Tiwari, Director General, BIS, attempted to dispel these concerns Saturday by describing the HUID -based hallmarking as a “win-win situation” for all parties and said that it would bring about transparency in the sector while protecting consumers’ interests.
“Looking at the pace of hallmarking, I do not believe there will be any problem in hallmarking 10 crore pieces of jewellery in a year, which is the estimated number of jewellery pieces that will be required to be hallmarked if hallmarking became mandatory across the country,” Tiwari told reporters.
Jain, however, responded to Tiwari’s comment saying, “Does he mean to say that the earlier process of hallmarking was not transparent?… We want to understand what the problem was with the old hallmarking and the difference in the [new] process in identifying the purity and the new transparencies.”
(Edited by Paramita Ghosh)
Also read: How Covid has changed the way Indians buy gold