Over 190 companies and 900 stores join India's gold audit
IAGES chief executive Kaushlendra Sinha says about 150 audit firms have been trained to run the third-party checks. Thirty to forty Gujarat stores have joined, along with manufacturers in Surat, Rajkot and Ahmedabad.
By The Retail Desk
What changed
The audit side got built. IAGES says more than 190 companies and 900 stores have joined its gold accreditation scheme. About 150 Indian audit firms have been trained to verify compliance.
What it means
- If you retail in Gujarat: Thirty to forty accredited stores in a state this size means accreditation is still a differentiator, not a baseline.
- If you audit: One hundred and fifty trained firms is the supply side of this market, and it was built before the demand side.
- If you buy gold: The check the scheme runs is one you can run yourself: hallmark and HUID against the BIS Care app listing.
- What this is not: A regulator. IAGES is self-regulatory, its code of conduct is its own, and accreditation carries no statutory force. Nothing here is a government requirement.
Key figures
| Companies accredited by IAGESsince September 2025 | 190+ |
|---|---|
| Stores accredited nationwideacross India | 900+ |
| Audit firms trained on the codeCA, CS and CMA firms | ~150 |
| Gujarat stores joinedplus Surat, Rajkot, Ahmedabad makers | 30-40 |
Source: Statements by the IAGES chief executive in an interview published 8 October 2026 at 22:15 India time
Two numbers and a date
Companies and stores. Sinha put the scheme at more than 190 companies and more than 900 stores nationwide. IAGES began granting accreditation in September 2025.
Gujarat is thin. Roughly 30 to 40 stores have joined in Gujarat, with manufacturers in Surat, Rajkot and Ahmedabad also in the process.
| Figure | What it counts | Status |
|---|---|---|
| More than 190 | Companies joined | Nationwide, since September 2025 |
| More than 900 | Stores joined | Nationwide |
| About 30 to 40 | Stores joined in Gujarat | Plus Surat, Rajkot and Ahmedabad manufacturers |
| About 150 | CA, CS and CMA firms trained | On code, document verification, reporting |
| Roughly 15% CAGR | Gold return over 25 years | Executive's own figure, untraced |
Notes on this table
Every row is an executive statement from a single interview, not an IAGES publication or a filing. The 15% compound annual growth figure is the only number in the interview Carat Capital could not trace to any published series, and it is printed as attributed to him rather than as a verified return. The other four appear verbatim in the article's own Gujarati body text and the raw bytes were grepped for each.
The audit is third-party
Not self-declared. A business must comply with the association's code of conduct, and compliance is verified through a neutral third-party audit. Accreditation follows only a passing audit.
Audit capacity first. About 150 chartered accountancy, company secretary and cost accountancy firms have been trained on the code, document verification and the reporting process.
A check inside the shop
Random piece, real app. Assessment includes picking jewellery at random from the retailer's own shop and checking its HUID against the Bureau of Indian Standards' BIS Care listing.
Consumers can repeat it. Sinha said buyers should verify hallmark and HUID through that app. The app returns design and purity details for the piece.
He declined the forecast
No price call. Asked how much further gold could rise, Sinha declined to forecast, naming geopolitics, the United States bond market, crude, the dollar and rising US debt.
One untraced figure. He said gold has returned roughly 15% compound annual growth over 25 years. That figure is his own, and Carat Capital could not trace it to a published series.
What to watch
- September 2026 onwardWhether IAGES publishes an accredited-member register that lets the 190 and 900 counts be checked from outside.
- Diwali 2026Whether accredited retailers price or market the accreditation during India's heaviest gold-buying weeks.
- Within a yearWhether the Gujarat count moves off 30 to 40 stores, in a state its own chief executive calls a top market.
The story so far
Go deeper
What would change this call
An IAGES register or an independent count that puts accredited stores materially below the stated figures, or evidence that the third-party audit is run by firms the applicant chooses and pays. Every number here comes from the scheme's own chief executive in one interview, with no published register to check it against.
How a voluntary scheme gets its teeth
India already has a statutory layer: hallmarking under the Bureau of Indian Standards, with a HUID identifier that a consumer can look up in the BIS Care app. A voluntary accreditation scheme cannot add legal force on top of that, so it has to add something the statute does not reach, and what IAGES says it adds is process audit rather than product testing. The distinction matters. A hallmark certifies a piece's purity; a code-of-conduct audit examines how a business documents, discloses and reports. That is why the trained-auditor count is the load-bearing figure in this interview rather than the member count: a scheme with 900 stores and no capacity to audit them is a logo, and a scheme with 150 trained firms has built the thing that makes the logo mean something. The open question a register would answer is who selects and pays the auditor, because a neutral audit chosen by the audited party is neutral only in form.
Method
The interview was fetched to raw bytes with a browser identity after the summarising fetch tool was not used for any figure, HTTP 200, 436,879 bytes, saved to newsroom/sources/2026-10-09/iages.html. Figures were read out of the article's own Gujarati body paragraphs; the tail of the page carries a weather and recirculation rail whose items belong to other stories and it was excluded. Quoted verbatim from the raw bytes: '190થી વધુ કંપનીઓ અને દેશભરમાં 900થી વધુ સ્ટોર' (more than 190 companies and more than 900 stores nationwide) and 'લગભગ 30થી 40 સ્ટોર્સ જોડાયા છે. સુરત, રાજકોટ અને' (roughly 30 to 40 stores have joined. Surat, Rajkot and). The publication timestamp was read from the page's own structured data: datePublished 2026-10-08T22:15:53+05:30. Raw-byte grep counts stated: '190' 30 hits, '900' 14, 'IAGES' 34; the loose numeric strings were resolved by reading the Gujarati sentences they sit in rather than by counting, since '190' and '900' also occur in page scripts. A separate GJEPC page the Bureau had ranked for this beat was fetched in the same run and returned a 'Page Not Found' body behind a 200 status, 32,266 bytes, so that item was dropped rather than carried. Archive check, searched in website/content/articles.json, the archive of record: 'IAGES' 0 hits; 'Kaushlendra' 0 hits. The nearest prior item, gjc-claims-a-record-and-prints-no-figure of 7 October 2026, names IAGES's chairman at a GJC trade show and carries no accreditation figures; it was opened and read. PERIOD AND SUBJECT NAMED ON BOTH SIDES: ours 2026-10-07 covers GJC's claim about India Gem and Jewellery Show sales in October 2026 | this item covers IAGES's accreditation totals from September 2025 to October 2026 and its audit capacity - DIFFERENT ORGANISATION, DIFFERENT SUBJECT, so NEW, not a repeat.