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Business News/ Industry / Retail/  When the gleam begins to fade
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When the gleam begins to fade

Before liberalization, the gold business was confined to certain people and certain towns or parts of cities

Jagdish Acharya keys in ‘south Indian jewellery’ on Google and tries to imitate what he sees. Photo: Hemant Mishra/MintPremium
Jagdish Acharya keys in ‘south Indian jewellery’ on Google and tries to imitate what he sees. Photo: Hemant Mishra/Mint

Mulki, Mangaluru: Jagdish Acharya’s shop can barely accommodate four people, and that is if all four squeeze in. For a shop selling gold, it is poorly lit, more so when compared with the glint and glitter of the contemporary jewellery showrooms.

Acharya, 51, is a fifth-generation goldsmith who has been working for the last 35 years in Mulki town, 29km from Mangaluru. In 1985, when he started working on his own, there were around 50-60 goldsmiths in his village.

A family goldsmith was like a family doctor, Acharya says. “For weddings, for births, for special occasions, we were called by our loyal families," he says. He catered to the demands of 10-15 families. Those were the loyal customers, and the rest kept coming as and when required, says Acharya.

He wasn’t forced into the business. The job his father did seemed exciting to Acharya when he was a little boy. He earned 100 per week and the entire family of six, with three goldsmiths, made around 2,000 a week. Acharya had a passion and also a sense of fashion, he thought. What the village mostly demanded then was traditional jewellery, very simple designs. The mangalsutra—an ornament that women wear denoting their marital status—was what was sold the most, apart from bangles.

The business of this small group of workers was doing so well and was there for so many decades that Acharya thought he had a future and that too a stable one.

Things started changing after 1995, says Acharya. “It wasn’t drastic, but it was changing. The customers changed, our jobs changed, the market changed," he says.

There was a shift from traditional jewellery to fashion jewellery. “No one wanted to wait. Everyone wanted things done instantly. Their orders delivered instantly, because they saw that there was an option like that. They realized they could just go to showrooms, choose and pick what they liked," says Acharya.

After liberalization in 1991, competition increased as high-end jewellery showrooms opened up. People started realizing that the wastage during the making of ornaments could be minimized with modern machinery and technology. Alongside these changes, the coming of cable television meant more advertising and that meant more visible options in everything for everyone. “By 2000, we knew our business was going down," says Acharya.

Before liberalization, the gold business was confined to certain people and certain towns or parts of cities. But as malls and a variety of jewellery brands started coming up, it seemed like a death knell for goldsmiths like Acharya, who had a family-oriented customer base. “Suddenly, people cared about purity, quality and time," says Acharya.

But while many gave up and took up menial jobs, Acharya thought of ways to improve his job. Pretending to be a customer, Acharya used to visit these showrooms, look at what they had to offer and see what the customers there demanded.

He also used the Internet to look at the changing jewellery designs. He doesn’t know about jewellery websites. He just keys in ‘south Indian jewellery’ on Google and tries to imitate what he sees. He is one of the very few goldsmiths who survived in this small town. Unlike earlier, he doesn’t work from home. He has a small shop where he takes orders. As a customer comes in, Acharya pulls out a tray full of rings from his safe.

Would he ask his three children to be goldsmiths as well? “No, they are better educated and will obviously do something better with their lives," he says.

This is the skill his father passed on to him and it has fascinated him as a child. But with so much competition in the market, there are not many takers for this “trust-based jewellery". Acharya says he does what only a very few jewellers in the country can: “I can blend the modern with the traditional. How many can?"

This is the 26th part in a series marking the 25th anniversary of India’s liberalization.

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Published: 23 Apr 2016, 12:37 AM IST
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