The Bureau of Indian Standards has revised hallmarking charges for gold and silver articles, raising the fee for gold to ₹75 from ₹45, while retaining the charge for silver at ₹35, with immediate effect ahead of the festive season.

The increase has been notified through the BIS (Hallmarking) Amendment Regulations, 2026, dated September 14, 2026.

Under the amended Schedule IV, jewellers are required to pay a hallmarking fee of ₹75 per article, subject to a minimum charge of ₹200 per consignment, while for silver articles, the fee payable by jewellers to recognised Assaying and Hallmarking Centres (AHCs) is fixed at ₹35 per article, with a minimum of ₹150 per consignment.

BIS hallmarking verifies the purity of a precious metal used in jewellery and certifies the article under the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), containing the three key markings: its logo, Karat or millesimal fineness, and a six-digit alphanumeric code known as the Hallmark Unique Identification (HUID) number.

Expressing concern over the move, the All India Gem and Jewellery Domestic Council (GJC) urged the government and BIS to immediately review the decision and retain the existing charge pending stakeholder consultation.

“GJC and the jewellery industry have consistently supported hallmarking because purity assurance and consumer confidence are fundamental to our trade. But support for hallmarking does not mean that a nearly 67% increase in the cost of mandatory compliance should pass without examination. Hallmarking volumes have expanded enormously. The industry, therefore, deserves to understand why the per-article charge needs to rise from ₹45 to ₹75 at this stage,” the apex industry body Chairman Rajesh Rokde said.

The priority should be to address issues of fake hallmarking, unauthorised operations and non-compliance before increasing the burden on compliant jewellers, he said.

“Compliance must remain commercially sustainable. If the compliant route becomes progressively more expensive while informal and unauthorised channels continue to operate, the differential between the two widens. That is not desirable either for the government, the industry or the consumer,” GJC Vice Chairman Avinash Gupta said.

Mr. Gupta raised industry concerns regarding aggressive discounting and commercial inducements in the race for hallmarking volumes.

On Wednesday two earthquakes, of magnitudes 7.1 and 7.5, struck seconds apart, levelling large parts of Caracas, Venezuela. On Friday, Jorge Rodriguez, the president of the country’s National Assembly, put the dead at 920 and the injured at 3,360. In La Guaira, the worst-hit State, over a hundred buildings crumpled to rubble. Geologically speaking, such destruction is, in Venezuela, an aberration. The country sits where the South American and Caribbean plates grind past one another, a boundary that slips sideways rather than thrusting upward — unlike the frequent quakes along the Pacific’s Ring of Fire. Strain here accumulates quietly, over generations, before the ground settles its accounts in a single afternoon. It is early days, but seismologists have explained the twin quakes as a ‘doublet,’ what the US Geological Survey (USGS) calls a “complex rupture-interaction”. Northern Venezuela saw a smaller doublet last year; the Türkiye-Syria earthquakes of 2023, which killed over 55,000 people, were of the same provenance. Their shallowness — under 30 kilometres — drove the fury straight into the streets above. The USGS has flagged a plausible toll exceeding 10,000, and the past is proof that such fears are likely to bear out rather than be refuted.

India, which has already offered help, should make relief its first duty — search teams, medical supplies, and the unglamorous logistics of a disaster zone. But there is a lesson here that it ought not to file away and forget. This year the Bureau of Indian Standards withdrew a decade’s worth of commissioned work that found seismic hazard along the Himalayan front badly underestimated — a revision that nearly doubled design forces in the highest zones and added a sixth zone to a map that stopped at five. It was shelved after a Cabinet Secretariat order warned the standards “materially affected” ongoing infrastructure, metro projects among them. India’s Zone V still designs for 0.36g, where g measures for how much the ground can shake. Pakistan and Nepal, on the same colliding front, reckon on nearly 0.75g, the United States and Japan on a full g or more. Nearly 79% of Indians live under moderate to severe seismic threat, and 95% of earthquake deaths occur in the one- to three-storey houses that no code ever reaches. Venezuela is a portent of the implicit danger that exists. The science of prediction will remain, for the foreseeable future, hope filling the gaps of uncertainty. What can be done is build structures that hold and keep their inhabitants safe. The earth follows its rhythm; the only choice is whether or not to be ready.

The Centre’s rollback of the revision to India’s earthquake zoning by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), follows a major challenge to the methodology used, which some engineers believe are out of sync with site-based evaluations. Yet, the reversal is driven largely by the massive cost and execution implications, as the decision impacts urban planning, disaster preparedness and climate resilience. The current earthquake zoning exercise is an opportunity to disaster- and climate-proof cityscapes, power infrastructure, dams, highways, and homes and offices as India undertakes an urban infrastructure expansion. Getting the zoning framework right has, arguably, never been more important.

At the heart of the debate lies the scientific approximation of possible earthquakes and their intensities, vis-à-vis the preparedness of the built environment to withstand them. Globally, most advanced economies and seismically active regions now use Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA), a dynamic framework that models earthquake risk through probability-based simulations of ground motion. Until now, India has primarily used a simpler fixed zoning model. The BIS’s attempt to move toward this globally accepted framework is, therefore, directionally correct. However, some structural engineers and policymakers argue that the revisions, which were notified in November 2025 and withdrawn on March 3, were too stringent. The proposed framework introduced an entirely new top-risk category, Zone VI, covering most of Kashmir, parts of the Himalayan belt, Kutch in Gujarat and the north-east. Urban planners worry that such zoning could stall developmental and infrastructure activity in already economically fragile regions, and potentially push more housing into the informal sector — which already accounts for nearly 80% of India’s homes. Estimates suggest that a one-zone increase could raise costs by around 20%, and two zones by nearly one-third. For major infrastructure such as metro rail systems, dams and power stations, the cost implication could be significantly higher. Pushback to the BIS revisions has come from both the private sector and within government, including the Ministries of Housing and Urban Affairs, Home Affairs, the Central Water Commission and the National Dam Safety Authority. Another layer in this debate is climate. The construction sector in India is among its largest dispersed sources of carbon emissions. While a revision in the earthquake zoning framework is necessary, it requires wider consultation across ministries, regulators and industry stakeholders. Only a holistic and implementable framework can strengthen disaster resilience and address climate mitigation, affordability and execution challenges.