TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi/ The government would soon bring out an integrated gold policy and set up a domestic gold council to promote growth in the sector, Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said on Friday.
Prabhu said the government is also looking at the industry’s demand for cutting import duty on gold to four per cent from the current 10 per cent.”This is one of the important issues for the industry that is export-oriented. If you have import duties, the working capital gets blocked up. So, we are already working on that.
“At the same time, the Finance Ministry has a responsibility to curtail the CAD (current account deficit), therefore, they are also trying to find out how we can keep the imports under control. So, we have to balance both together,” the Minister told reporters at the India Gold and Jewellery Summit here.
India is among the biggest importers of the yellow metal with imports of over $33.65 billion in the last fiscal. As a result, the country’s CAD widened to 2.4 per cent of the GDP in the first quarter of 2018-19.
