Suresh Prabhu inaugurated the first edition of India Gold and Jewellery Summit at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi today.

Also present were Praveenshankar Pandya, Chairman, GJEPC, PR Somadundaram, MD, WGC, India, Balram Garg, MD, PC Jewellers and Rita Teaotia, Commerce Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, K Srinivasan, Convener, JPC, GJEPC and Manoj Dwivedi, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

During his welcome address, Praveenshankar Pandya stressed on the need to enhance designing capabilities of the jewellery industry. He said, “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 US$6-7 billion now. We need to aim at US$20 billion.”

Suresh Prabhu during his address in the Summit said, “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 that we have. We should use them to supply handmade jewellery to the all over the 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.”

Day 1 will cover sessions on Vision 2022: Indian Jewellery Exports At $25 billion, Value Addition Through Jewellery Manufacturing, Code of Conduct and Standards for Industry, Gold Policy Focus – View point from policymakers, Gold Spot Exchange for India, PMLA, GST for Gold and Jewellery Industry.

The 2-day Summit is being held on 1-2 December. The Summit will bring together policymakers and industry to discuss issues such as formulating a comprehensive gold policy with one authority, reduction of import duty on gold to 4 per cent to make the sector more organised, setting up of jewellery parks and common facility centres and a Gem and Jewellery university.