-The apex industry body can do the selection of eligible Jewellers, Hallmarking Centers and Refiners based on well laid out criteria, reputation and track record of performance.
-Further, the entire process can be made well-structured and transparent through a well drafted process of manual and audit systems.

-Further, should the operations require, most of the large and medium sized jewelers are fairly equipped to conduct all initial melting, XRF, to derive the fundamental content of pure gold meant for deposits at his own outlet and give the depositor a tentative estimate of the gold content on refining. Once the Customer approves the broad indicative numbers provided by the Jeweller, the Jeweller can get the final assaying and refining done at the Government nominated centers.

-A depositor of gold may have various queries related to legalities, rights, family arrangements, ROI, and may require moral support to part with his gold. A Bank or a Hallmarking Center will not be able to handle such matter as well as a jeweller can.
-A customer may not trust his gold with any person or assaying institution as they are not known to the customer and not situated in a place of customer convenience. It is here that the Jeweller emerges as the single choice as Collection Agent

-A scheme of this magnitude cannot be rolled out without a proper sales and marketing structure in place. A well laid out sales manual and marketing program can be designed to make sur a maximum number of gold deposits are collected from across the country at a depositors convinience.
-A minimum of 10000500 – 20000 collection points across the country are required for this Scheme to achieve the desired goal and targets.

In our view, given the long history of the Gems and Jewellery industry and strong bonding and loyalty which Jewellers have with their customers and vice versa, Jewellers are the best suited intermediaries who can help connect this Scheme with their millions of customers across the country. Further, the Jewellers also have full knowledge of their customers from their data bases and hence are well poised to act as an effective enabler to market and promote this scheme by targeting focused persons

The business of banks is collecting of deposits and lending of money and not collecting gold /Jewellery under this Scheme. As such, this activity will not be in primary focus of the banks, which is what happened in the past schemes also announced by the Government, due to which these schemes miserably failed to collect more than a pittance of gold from the market and died its natural death at the market place.

while emphasis is being placed on assaying and refining infrastructure, what is really required apart from this is the infrastructure to connect and interact with the people at large and facilitate the collection and transacting of the gold across the country under this Scheme. This aspect of the crucial infrastructure requirement seems to have been totally left to the banks which are going to open the “Gold Savings Account”. Past 1999 scheme cnfms the banks are ill equipped to handle gold.

Looking at the magnitute of the scheme as such it is imperative that all stakeholders in the Gems and Jewellery industry must be involved in the formulation and active implementation of the Scheme to ensure that the Scheme becomes a major success and ultimately benefiting the Indian economy. The present draft of the Scheme does not bring out this objective and intent clearly and forcefully and as such unless this is redrafted and re-positioned in a proper manner.

The real impact and benefit of this measure is in terms of providing a major boost to the Indian economy by release of the idle funds locked in these gold assets and its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) multiplier effect has not been highlighted. This is a very significant point given that even if we consider an annual release of 200/250 tons annually ie. 1% of Gold under this Scheme (as against an estimated Gold inventory of 24,000 tons held in country.

The entire draft of the GMS seems to have been designed on how operations of assaying and refining will take place largely disregarding the true goals and how the targets will be achieved and the manner to be proposed. It seems to be evolving around a singular premise of refining based on standards which are held by a very few refiners in India and seems biased. There are no projections of how much gold will the proposed 300+ Hallmarking centers will be able to garner.