India is a major producer of gold jewellery and melts about 700 tonnes of gold per annum. In the world market of about 65 billion US $ and in spite of the quality of the jewellery makers our market share is only about 1%. This poor market share of the Indian jewellery is attributed to the poor quality of the metal being used through under carating. Considering the loss of consumers due to under carating, Department of Science & Technology, New Delhi thought appropriate to develop a hallmarking system for gold jewellery. On this background, National Metallurgical Laboratory had earlier developed an alternative technique on hallmarking using ICP-OES as a tool in place of conventional Fire Assaying technique. The salient features of the developed protocol are

	Small sample requirement (20 mg) as against 250 mg required for Fire Assay
	Simultaneous determinations of the alloying elements including toxic elements Cd, Ni, Cr etc.
	Hazard free as no toxic lead fumes are generated
	Rapid analytical method
	Simple method as compared to Fire Assay

Present proposal took the initiative to establish a hallmarking centre, at initially Jamshedpur, using the developed technique and study the feasibility to establish to establish fully commercial hallmarking centre in other metres.

The objectives of the present proposal are

· To establish the fineness of the gold jewellery to a precision and accuracy comparable to Fire Assay
· To determine the presence of toxic and other alloying elements in the gold jewellery
· Use low volume to enable a easier refinish of the jewellery