The India Gold & Jewellery Summit kicked off with an optimistic note at Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi. The entire industry and dignitaries from Turkey, China and other countries came together to discuss on the most pertinent issues that are currently plaguing the industry.

“Our skills have to be improved. We are totally satisfied with just catering to the domestic market. We need to have strong designing capabilities otherwise we won’t be able to do justice to the markets of the U.S. and Europe. We also have to set up a standard for Gold refineries. They need to be of international standards. Currently, India is importing more than it exports and we need an exclusive authority that monitors what is being imported from where. We need to reduce the duty to 4-5 per cent to generate more employment and prevent smuggling. We are at $ 6-7 billion now. We need to aim at $ 20 billion,’ said Praveenshankar Pandya, Chairman, GJEPC.

The Chief Guest, Honorable Minister of Commerce & Industry, Suresh Prabhu, stressed on the importance of handmade jewellery and focusing on building a platform between the goldsmith and a larger jewellery entity. ‘We need to create a gold board and to create something like that we need comprehensive policies. We need to have quantifiable targets. We have goldsmiths in every nook and corner of our country and we need to make use of this large human resource we have. We should use them to supply handmade jewellery to the entire world because that’s where the demand lies.

For this we need to focus on how we can link the common goldsmith from a village to an institutional mechanism. Our GDP growth in the last quarter looks very encouraging. And we need more and more economic activity to grow further and the gold and jewellery sector will play a major role in this. I will see to it that I work with you to achieve this.’

The first session, Vision 2022: Indian Jewellery Exports at $ 25 billion had eminent panelists from the industry: PN Prasad, CGM, SBI, Mehul Choksi, Chairman & MD, Gitanjali Group, Bobby Kothari from Jewelex, Chandu Siroya, Vice Chairman, Dubai Gold & Jewellery Group, Rona O’ Connell, Thomson & Reuters, Sailesh Sangani, Convenor, GJEPC, and Sunil Kashyap, MD, Scotia Mocatta. The session was moderated by Manoj Dwivedi. “This industry has the potential to generate more employment and also contribute to the GDP of the country in a big way,” said Dwivedi.

The day came to and end with yet another important session ‘Code of Conduct & Standards for Industry,’ moderated by Rajesh Khosla from MMTC PAMP. The panel included Ms. Shakila Mirza, LBMA’s General Counsel and Executive Board Member, Venkateswaran, Director, NABL, David Bouffard, Signet Vice President, Tyler Gillard, Sector Projects, Responsible Business Conduct Unit, Investment Division at OECD, Surendra Mehta, National Secretary of India Bullion & Jewellers Association, Shivanshu Mehta, MCX, James Jose, MD, CGR Metalloys, Ajay Mathur, Director, Precious Metals and Avinash Gupta, Director, GJF.

Day 2 focused on Gold Policy with opening remarks by Praveenshankar Pandya. The panel consisted of Aram Shishmanian, CEO, World Gold Council, Emre Koker, Turkish Treasury, Head of Domestic Debt Management Dept, Dr. Hasmukh Adhi, Finance Secretary, Alok Chaturvedi, Director General of Foreign Trade and Ratan P Watal from Niti Aayog. The session was moderated by Latha Venkatesh, Executive Editor CNBC. The second session on Gold Spot Exchange was equally engaging with Arvind Sahay, Head of India Gold Policy Centre, SK Jindal, Chairman, Assocham, Rahul Gupta, Director, Bullion Federation of India, Amar Singh, Executive Director, Global Commodities-Marketing, JP Morgan, Sanjeev Vohra, Head, Precious Metals, DGCX and Ramakrishnan Padmanabhan, VP, Treasury, Indistrial & Commercial Bank of China – Rep IBBA. The panel was moderated by Somasundaram, MD, WGC, India.

The summit came to an end with a presentation on PMLA by Balesh Kumar, Principal ADG and DG of GSTI and GST by Rohan Shah, Legal Expert.