A long stretch of road housing rows upon rows of jewellery shops in the Old Town area of Anantapur has gone silent, devoid of its usual bustle.
The street used to be jam-packed with customers, flitting in and out of jewellery shops. Goldsmiths’ workshops, where customers would get their gold and silver ornaments polished, have also downed shutters.
The lockdown has dealt a body blow to the city’s retail gold ornament business, which has a large labour component. There are 800 shops in the city, either selling new jewellery, or engaged in repairing and polishing ornaments. More than 2,000 workers, both skilled and semi-skilled, are employed here, who subject the yellow metal to five stages of treatment before it is sold to the customer.
Workers here get their wages in the form of gold and only a miniscule part as cash. Except for those coming for some repair or polishing works, none pays the goldsmith in cash. For example, if a person gets a 50 gram ornament made, four to five persons complete it in three to four days. During the process, they accumulate gold filings or pieces as residue and that becomes their payment, a goldsmith named Kadiyala Ramanjaneyulu told The Hindu .
Retailers give the workers 5% to 7% excess gold in weight and while subjecting the yellow metal to moulding, cutting, designing, fitting, and polishing to create the desired ornament, some amount of gold gets accumulated with a particular worker performing a process and he gets 600 milligrams, which translates into ₹600 for an ornament or ₹300 a day. All this income has dried up for the past one month.
Gold prices have skyrocketed in recent days, with 10 grams selling for ₹45,000 a week ago and then settling above ₹40,000, despite the COVID-19 lockdown forcing jewellers to close their shops and buyers not seen anywhere as most of the marriages have been put off, said Mr. Ramanjaneyulu.
The Goldsmiths’ Welfare Association has pooled some money and provided 10 kg rice, 1 kg of pulses, oil and wheat to 100 workers. A second round of donations is being readied and only 10% of these workers have got a cash advance from their work providers. Some of them have got up to ₹4,000, but are worried about paying their children’s school fees and house rent by the first week of May.
“Unless another month of hand-holding by philanthropists or government agencies is done, most of these workers might settle in some odd jobs of selling fruits, vegetables or driving an auto-rickshaw,” Mr. Ramanjaeyulu said.
