Saturday, 03 July 2021 | PNS | Dehradun
Over 300 jewellers sell BIS hallmarked gold jewellery in the Dehradun district. Many are approaching the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to register to sell hallmarked gold jewellery as per Central Government’s recent guidelines. The government has made hallmarking on gold jewellery and other related items mandatory under the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Regulations from June 16. However, the government has made hallmarking compulsory in only 256 districts across the country under BIS regulations. “The government selected mostly those 256 districts in the first phase where BIS recognised Assaying and Hallmarking Centres are already present. In Uttarakhand, the hallmarking of gold jewellery and other certain items of gold is mandatory in two districts which are Pithoragarh and Dehradun. Soon, more A & H Centres will be opened by the government to commence the second phase of mandatory hallmarking system in all districts here,” said the member of Dehradun Sarrafa Mandal, Devendra Dhalla.
He said that with the mandatory hallmarking system, the buying and selling process will be more transparent for jewellers as well as consumers,” According to him, this system will be more beneficial to the consumers as they would not have to rely on jeweller’s words to know the purity of their gold items. He informed that the consumers will have to pay only Rs 35 extra for each BIS hallmarked jewellery. He further disclosed that jewellers were earlier allowed to sell hallmarked gold articles of only 14, 18 and 22 carats but after a committee of various industrialists and jewellers approached the central government to bring 20, 23 and 24 carats under the mandatory hallmarking system, the government approved it.
Meanwhile, the head of the Dehradun branch office of BIS, Sudhir Bishnoi informed that though the government has given time to jewellers to hallmark their pieces of jewellery by August considering they might have the bulk of gold articles, they are not allowed to sell gold articles without BIS hallmark anymore. However, there are few exceptions in the mandatory hallmarking system too. According to Bishnoi, hallmarking is not mandatory for gold articles like fountain pens, watches and types of jewellery like jadau, kundan or polki. Besides this, jewellers with annual turnover up to Rs 40 lakh are exempted from the mandatory BIS hallmarking rule. He said that there are over 300 jewellers that sell hallmarked gold articles in the Dehradun district and this number will increase soon. “We are regularly receiving applications for BIS certificate registration. In the last 10 days, we had registered about 100 jewellers and this number will increase in the future,” said Bishnoi.
What is hallmarking?
Hallmarking is a process that is done by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to guarantee the purity of a certain gold item. Explaining the hallmarking system, the head of the Dehradun branch office of BIS, Sudhir Bishnoi said that three marks are marked in a gold article to represent its purity. “The first mark is of Assaying and Hallmarking Centres where the marking of jewellery is done. The second mark represents the purity of gold. For example, if the gold article is made of 22-carat gold, it will be marked as 22 K 916 which means the article has 91.6 per cent of gold. The third mark is a six-digit unique identification number (HUID) which is different for every piece of article,” explained Bishnoi.
