Silver has had a loud couple of years on price, and a very quiet one on tax. The silver gst percentage in India is 3% on the metal's value under HSN 7106, covering every form from raw bullion and bars to coins and jewellery, with making charges on jewellery carrying 5% where itemised, and no cess of any kind on top. The rate has stood unchanged since GST replaced the old patchwork of excise duty and state-wise VAT, and the September 2025 slab reform left silver exactly where gold sits, on the special 3%. This guide covers the rate against its pre-GST past, the full HSN sub-code table, two worked purchases with the formula, the input tax credit split between traders and households, and the points that matter to an investor, including what silver is worth as loan collateral.

Hold a bangle up to the light with a magnifying glass and a short story appears, stamped in millimetre-high characters. Those hallmark signs jewellery carries tell the reader exactly what was tested, how pure the metal proved, and which individual piece this is out of every ornament in the country: three marks, three answers. Current BIS hallmarks consist of the triangular BIS logo, a fineness number such as 916, and a six-character HUID code, and reading them takes about a minute once each is understood. Older pieces carry a fourth mark, which this guide explains too. What follows covers what a hallmark is, each of the three current marks in turn with the full fineness-to-karat table, the 2021 changeover from the old four-mark system, a four-step verification routine, and why the fineness stamp is the first thing a gold loan appraiser looks for.

A suitcase lands in Mumbai carrying a Dubai-bought bangle, and a question lands with it. The imported gold hallmark position in India runs on one distinction: jewellery brought in for personal wear needs no BIS hallmark to sit in a locker, while any piece headed for sale must carry one, since India's mandatory hallmarking regime covers all gold jewellery sold in the country, imported or not. Between those two poles sits the pledge, where lenders assess purity themselves but a hallmark smooths everything. This guide covers who the rules touch, from NRIs and returning travellers to traders, the customs allowance under the new Baggage Rules, the step-by-step hallmarking process at an Indian centre, the purity grades BIS accepts, why a foreign stamp does not count, and what all of it means at a gold loan counter.

Indian households sit on a staggering quantity of gold, upwards of 25,000 tonnes by some industry estimates, and for generations the only way to add to it was a visit to a jeweller. The history of digital gold in India is the story of that habit meeting a smartphone. In under a decade, buying gold went from a counter transaction to a two-tap purchase of ₹10, and then ran into the hard questions every fast-growing product eventually faces about regulation and trust. This guide walks the full digital gold timeline: the fintech launch years of 2018 and 2019, the pandemic surge, the regulatory turn from 2022, the consolidation that followed, and where the market stands in 2026, closing with how digital gold compares against its regulated cousins and where a gold loan sits for households holding physical metal.

Silver's price run has pulled a new question into app stores: how does digital silver work, and can a few taps really own real metal? The mechanics answer plainly. Each purchase links to a specific quantity of physical silver, typically 999 purity, held by an independent custodian in a vault that typically carries insurance cover; buying triggers an allocation of silver to the account, selling triggers a de-allocation with proceeds reaching the bank inside a defined settlement window, and the metal stays legally separate from the platform's own balance sheet throughout. The structure borrows digital gold's playbook, with silver's own quirks in storage and settlement. This guide covers who the custodian is and what "legally separate" means, how vault storage, insurance and audits operate, the difference between allocated and pooled holdings, the buy and sell flows step by step, the spread and taxes, and the physical redemption route.

The app shows grams; the vault holds metal. That is the entire architecture in one line, and understanding how digital gold work means understanding the machinery between those two points. Digital gold is a claim on physical 24-carat gold held in a secure vault, typically with insurance cover, by a custodian on the buyer's behalf: every rupee spent buys a proportional weight at the live price, allocated to the buyer's account, and holdings can be sold back for cash or redeemed as coins and bars. The interesting questions all sit underneath. Who exactly is the custodian, what stops the platform from touching the gold, and what happens between a sell order and money in the bank? This guide works through the custodian and vault structure, the ring-fencing that protects holdings, the full settlement lifecycle step by step, and the costs a buyer meets along the way.

An admission letter arrives with a fee deadline printed ten days out, and the financing question turns urgent. Understanding how education loan works in India starts with the basics: a lender funds tuition and related study costs, usually paying the institution directly, with a co-applicant standing behind the student and repayment beginning only after a moratorium. Sanction typically takes anywhere from a week to a few weeks, which is fine for a planned admission and tight for a sudden one. This guide covers the full picture: what an education loan pays for, who qualifies, the documents, the step-by-step process, how interest and the moratorium actually behave, and the alternative that fits when the deadline will not wait, a gold loan against household jewellery, which typically involves a much shorter processing cycle and generally no restriction on use.

A home loan lets a buyer borrow up to 90% of a property's assessed value and repay it in monthly instalments over as long as 30 years. That single sentence answers how a home loan works at the headline level, and hides the two numbers that decide everything underneath: the EMI, which sets what leaves the account every month, and the LTV ratio, which sets how much of the price the lender will fund and therefore how much the buyer must bring as a down payment. The down payment is where most first purchases actually stall. This guide covers the mechanics, the EMI formula with a full worked example, the tiered LTV slabs, the application steps, and the angle few guides touch: how a gold loan against household jewellery can help arrange the upfront contribution when savings fall short.

One gold chain, roughly 10 grams, sits in most Indian lockers, and its lending power in 2026 is larger than many owners guess. The 10 gram gold loan amount for a 22-carat ornament works out to approximately ₹1,05,000 to ₹1,10,000 at recent price levels, because loans of this size fall in RBI's most generous loan-to-value tier, up to 85% of the gold's assessed value. Three variables set the exact figure: the benchmark gold price on the day of pledge, the ornament's purity, and the LTV tier the loan lands in. This guide unpacks all three, lays out a purity-wise reference table for exactly 10 grams, walks the calculation step by step, covers eligibility and documents, and explains what happens if gold prices move after the pledge.

Understanding the tax treatment of an investment is often just as important as evaluating its return potential. For investors using silver exchange traded funds (Silver ETFs) to gain exposure to silver prices, capital gains taxation depends primarily on the holding period and the timing of the transaction under the prevailing income-tax framework.