Guidelines for gold monetisation scheme revised, here's what expert has to say

Gold monetisation scheme has been wanting a lot of guidelines to be cleared and the Finance Ministry now seems to be heading towards it.

Surendra Mehta, National Secretary at IBJA spoke to CNBC-TV18 and said, "This is going to be a historical change in the gold monetisation scheme. These are path breaking changes as far as the gold industry is concerned, as far as the decision about household and other trust gold is concerned."

Mehta said, "India has 25,000 tonnes of gold and the government has been trying to get unused gold, unproductive gold from the household so that it reduces the import burden and helps in curbing the current account deficit of the country. But with the new policy which we are looking at, jewellers have been involved, all the public sector banks have been involved and at least 33 percent of the public sector banks needs to have the gold monetisation facility - this is a big one."

He added, "It is not only the change of gold monetisation scheme, it is revamping the entire ecosystem of the gold which is to be procured by the bank and bank need to lease it out as the gold metal loan. So, it is revamping the gold metal loan also."