Gold Faces Stiff Challenge

India consumes almost one-third of the world’s gold production. India was hailed as the ‘Land of the Golden Sparrow’ by the Romans, some 300 years before Christ. Twenty-four centuries later, India’s obsession for gold has not waned. While the combined gold reserves of all the central banks in the world in the second quarter of 2021, as per World Gold Council, is about 31,103 tonnes, privately held gold in India in 2015, was estimated to be 20,000 tonnes, as per the 2015-16 Budget speech by the then Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley. The Corruptible Lure of Gold “India was known as the land of the golden sparrow because Indian merchants sought only gold from the rest of the world, which seemed to have an insatiable appetite for Indian textiles and spices,” writes Devdutt Pattanaik, in his book, Olympus. It seems that we have inherited our ancestors’...