Tirupati Balaji may come to the rescue of Modi.
Tirumala Venkateswara Temple, considered to be the country's largest custodian of gold deposits, might come to the rescue of the Prime Minister's ambitious Gold Monetisation Scheme launched earlier in November.
The scheme, launched along with the gold bond and the national gold coin initiatives, hasn't met with much success and the state-owned trading major MMTC has initiated talks with the temple trust authorities to participate in the scheme, MMTC head Ved Prakash has said.
MMTC is also targeting the rich non-resident Indians (NRIs) to market the gold coins minted with the national emblem of Ashok Chakra engraved on it. Previous attempts to popularise gold coins within the country hasn't been quite successful.
"We have just initiated the discussion with Tirupati (Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams). They may give around a tonne initially. Tirupati is the biggest gold custodian, having tonnes and tonnes of gold," Prakash said on the sidelines of a conference by the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries.
The Tirupati temple is believed to be holding about 200 tonnes of gold in its vaults, with the temple authorities believed to be receiving 10 kg of gold every week.
"They have been giving us small quantities for melting to convert it into Tirupati medallion to be given to the devotees. Some gold is also being melted into bricks. Now, we believe the temple trust would give huge quantities under the scheme," he said.
The temple's huge resource remains largely untapped and the government is now worried over the lukewarm response to the gold scheme, with the finance ministry likely to hold a review meeting with banks and RBI representatives on Tuesday to assess the scheme.
For the national gold coin scheme, MMTC is planning to launch the scheme globally, particularly among the rich NRI community spread over the UK, the US, Singapore, UAE and Africa.
"We believe that for the national coin, which the country never had before, there would be a huge demand from the NRI community. So far, we have produced about 50,000 coins. We plan to produce 2,000 coins a day. The demand is going to be much more, once it is launched globally," he said.
Within the country, it is in talks with three banks -- ICICI Bank, SBI and Indian Overseas Bank, apart from the postal department – to market the scheme.
"Maybe within 10 days, we would tie up with one of the banks for 100-150 centres across the country. Then we would launch the scheme after creating the marketing infrastructure all over India. That's why we are yet to launch it in a big way although the Prime Minister officially launched it on November 5. Now we are selling the coins through our own distribution centres. We are ready to supply the projected demand of about 1 lakh coins a month once we rope in the Hyderabad Mint. Initially, the coins are getting minted in the Mumbai with the one in Kolkata just starting production," he said.
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