5.9 million pieces: India's silver rush reaches the assay office

INearly double in a single financial year

The Bureau of Indian Standards disclosed the figures on 9 August alongside a plan to scale up testing and certification capacity, and named the cause plainly: consumers moving into silver because gold has become unaffordable. Silver hallmarking in India has been voluntary since 2005, and the bureau has set no timeline for making it mandatory.

The infrastructure numbers give the scale of the build. About 230 bureau-recognised assaying and hallmarking centres currently handle silver testing across the country. The bureau's recognised laboratory network has gone from 147 in 2014 to 440 today, and government-empanelled laboratories from 24 to 350, against ten standalone bureau laboratories and roughly 270,000 product samples tested.

Nishat S Haque, the bureau's deputy director general for laboratories, said the expansion runs over the next two years: "Within that period, we will be expanding referral and assay laboratories across the country." Gold surveillance stays in-house; silver testing is being pushed out to the recognised centres while capacity catches up.

II230 centres, and a two-year build behind them

The substitution behind the number is one this paper has been tracking in pieces all year without a volume measure attached to it. Indian gold jewellery demand fell 15% by weight in the second quarter to 75.1 tonnes, its lowest second quarter since the pandemic, while the value of that demand rose about 50%.

Kalyan Jewellers took more than 46% of its June-quarter revenue in recycled metal and more than 55% in the month of June alone. Those are demand-side and sourcing-side readings of the same pressure. A hallmarking count is neither: it is a physical count of finished articles passing through a testing centre.

The assay office is where a substitution stops being anecdote and becomes volume.

IIIA count of finished articles, not of intent

What is missing from the announcement is the thing the trade would most like to know. There is no mandatory-hallmarking date for silver, which means the 5.9 million figure is a count of articles voluntarily submitted rather than a census of what India actually made.

Gold's own mandatory regime, phased in from 2021, roughly tripled the certified count in its first three years, so the silver series is measuring the leading edge of a market rather than its size.

The bureau introduced a hallmark unique identification number for silver in September 2025, which is the piece of plumbing a mandatory regime would need, and it is already in place.