Journal

Gold in India is rarely only metal. It is a wedding gift set aside for a daughter, a season's savings folded into a chain, a small act of hope bought on Dhanteras. Every one of those moments rests on a single, quiet assurance: that what is stamped on the piece is true. In the past year, that assurance has been tested as never before. **When the mark itself is forged** The counterfeit of 2026 does not always arrive as a dull, brass-coloured trinket. Increasingly it comes looking exactly right — with a hallmark, a purity stamp and a six-character HUID that, when checked, returns a genuine record. The forgery is no longer in the gold alone. It is in the certification. Hallmarking is mandatory in India, and every genuine piece carries three marks: the BIS logo, the purity in carat and fineness (say, 22K916), and a unique Hallmarking Unique Identification number. Since mandatory hallmarking began in June 2021, more than 650 million gold articles have been stamped with a HUID. That success has cast a shadow — a thriving trade in copying the stamp itself. In July, the Kerala Gold and Silver Merchants Association asked the Bureau of Indian Standards to investigate counterfeit bangles bearing fraudulent HUID stamps in Kozhikode. On examination, the numbers corresponded to genuine jewellery processed at a recognised hallmarking centre — the signature, the association said, of an organised criminal network. In Kanpur, police are probing a suspected racket involving 25 to 30 laser engraving machines allegedly used to print counterfeit BIS marks, a misuse that traders say swells with the wedding and festive season. In one case there, a chain stamped 18-carat was found to hold barely a tenth of that in gold. In Surat, a ring sold as 9-carat through Instagram reels was found to contain less than one carat; its true metal was silver. The methods are as varied as they are brazen. Some pieces are gold-plated silver, with a genuine hallmark on the clasp and cheap metal in the body. Some copy the design of a certified ornament and reproduce it in lower purity. Some pass off gold foil over another metal as a 24-carat bar. Each one leans on the same weakness: a buyer who trusts the mark without checking it. **The widening grey market** Behind much of this sits a second problem — the gold that never entered the country legally. India more than doubled its gold import duty to 15% in May 2026. The gap between domestic and international prices widened sharply, and the grey market found its opening. Smuggled gold is being offered at discounts of as much as ₹8,000 per 10 grams, and industry estimates suggest more than 100 tonnes could enter India through illegal channels this year. That gold does not stay in bars for long. It is converted into jewellery at unauthorised manufacturing centres and reaches the counter with fake hallmarks, often selling ₹200–300 per gram below the honest price. The government loses billions in tax. The honest jeweller, who pays duty, hallmarking fees and GST, cannot match a price built on cheating — and is left to explain to customers why his gold costs more. The damage is not theoretical. A landmark BIS investigation that bought jewellery from 120 jewellers across eight cities found that only 14 samples — roughly one in eight — conformed to their declared purity. The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission called it an alarming situation. **Who pays, and how much** The cost falls first on households. A family that spends its savings on what it believes is 22-carat gold, and later finds it is not, has lost not just money but a measure of security it cannot easily replace. The loss surfaces at the worst moments — at resale, at a pawn shop, at a jeweller's counter years later. It falls, too, on legitimate businesses and institutions. In Kochi, a gang cheated a pawn shop of nearly ₹1 crore by first pawning real gold to win the staff's trust, then substituting fake hallmarked pieces. In Ahmedabad, a jeweller was defrauded of gold worth ₹2.2 crore when nine bars he accepted in payment turned out to be gold-foiled metal. Banks, pawnbrokers and lenders that accept gold as collateral now find their own security is only as reliable as the mark upon it. And it falls on the idea of gold itself. When a hallmark can be faked, the mark stops meaning anything, and every jeweller — honest or not — is treated with suspicion. That is the real destruction: not a single swindle, but the slow erosion of a trust that took decades to build. **What is being done** The response has been steady. The Bureau of Indian Standards has conducted search-and-seizure operations across the country — 7.875 kg of non-hallmarked gold worth ₹10 crore in Warangal, 804 grams in Chennai's Ambattur, 72.7 grams and a laser marking machine in Kadapa, and more. The law is firm: selling unregistered or spuriously hallmarked gold can bring imprisonment of up to one to two years and fines from ₹1 lakh to several times the value of the goods. More…