PNG Jewellers, founded in Pune in 1832, today announced Swarna Swaraj, a nation-first initiative to mobilise India’s vast dormant household gold, reduce the country’s dependence on gold imports, and encourage more responsible patterns of gold ownership and consumption across the country.

The initiative is PNG Jewellers’ direct and voluntary response to Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi’s appeal to all Indians to exercise restraint in gold purchases, a call the brand has received not as a business, but as an institution with 194 years of shared history with the Indian people.

In those 194 years, PNG Jewellers has stood alongside this nation through the Great Depression, two World Wars, the freedom struggle, Partition, and a global pandemic. The brand’s customers are not a consumer base accumulated over a few decades; they are a generational community, built across centuries. That relationship is what Swarna Swaraj draws on.

India is estimated to hold over 25,000 tonnes of privately owned gold, much of it lying dormant in bank lockers, family vaults, and inherited collections. This gold has not lost its value. It has simply stopped moving. Swarna Swaraj is an invitation to let it move again, for the family, and for the nation.

Commenting on the campaign, Chairman and Managing Director Dr. Saurabh Gadgil commented,

“When our Prime Minister calls on the nation, we do not respond as a retailer. We respond as an institution. For 194 years, this brand has been a guest in the homes of Indian families, present at their weddings, their celebrations, their milestones. Today, we ask that trust to work in a larger direction. India’s gold should circulate within India. That is the simplest and most powerful thing we can do together.”

The Six Commitments of Swarna Swaraj

1. Old Gold Exchange — Bring it in. Let it live again.

PNG Jewellers will open dedicated Gold Recirculation Counters across all its showrooms and franchise outlets nationwide. Customers are invited to bring in old, unused, broken, or inherited jewellery, pieces that have been sitting in lockers, waiting. Each piece brought in will be assessed with full transparency, on the spot. Gold recirculated through this programme will be refined and reintroduced into the domestic jewellery ecosystem, directly reducing the need for freshly imported gold. Every customer who participates will receive a commemorative Swarna Swaraj Certificate, a quiet acknowledgement of a contribution made not just to their own family, but to the nation.

2. Encouraging a Shift Toward Lower-Karat Gold for Bridal and Festive Shopping

India’s love for 22Kt gold is cultural and generational, and PNG Jewellers has no intention of dismissing it. But the economic reality of gold’s role in India’s import bill asks for a gradual, voluntary shift in how that love is expressed. 18Kt gold requires significantly less pure gold per piece while enabling craftsmanship of equal quality and beauty. PNG Jewellers will actively expand and promote its 18Kt collections, making the case through design, education, and honest conversation with its customers, that choosing 18Kt is not settling for less. It is choosing thoughtfully.

3. Lightweight and Everyday Jewellery in 14Kt and 9Kt for Litestyle by PNG

For a country that wears gold as much as it saves it, the greatest opportunity for import reduction lies in daily wear. Jewellery in 14Kt and 9Kt uses a fraction of the gold required for traditional 22Kt pieces, while lending itself naturally to the kind of lightweight, wearable design that younger Indian consumers are increasingly drawn to. Litestyle by PNG will expand its collections in these formats, and communicate them not as a compromise on tradition, but as a new, modern expression of it. Wearing gold every day, in smaller quantities, is one of the most tangible contributions any Indian household can make to reducing the nation’s import dependence.

4. Community Conversations

PNG Jewellers’ most enduring asset is not its inventory or its store count. It is the trust it holds within communities that have purchased from PNG across two, three, sometimes four generations. Swarna Swaraj will mobilise that trust through grassroots conversations in partnership with cooperative housing societies, Ganesh mandals, mahila mandals, and women’s self-help groups across Maharashtra and beyond. The goal is not to run awareness campaigns. It is to have the kind of honest, informed conversations about gold that only a 194-year-old brand, with the relationship capital PNG carries, can credibly initiate.

5. Responsible Consumption as a Long-Term Cultural Shift

Swarna Swaraj is not a campaign with a start and end date. It is PNG Jewellers’ public commitment to a long-term shift in how gold is owned, used, and valued in India. The brand will use every customer touchpoint — in-store, online, and through its community networks — to build a more informed, more responsible culture around gold. One that values gold not just as an adornment or an inheritance, but as a living resource: capable of being exchanged, redesigned, and recirculated without losing its meaning.

6. Industry Advocacy As one of India’s oldest jewellery institutions, PNG Jewellers recognises that the structural changes India’s gold economy needs cannot be driven by brand initiatives alone. The brand commits to actively engaging with industry bodies and policymakers to advocate for reforms that make domestic gold recirculation more efficient, more rewarding for consumers, and less vulnerable to the grey market pressures that sharp import duty increases risk creating. PNG Jewellers has seen enough of this nation’s history to know that durable economic change is built through policy, not just through intent. It will bring that perspective, and its 194 years of institutional credibility, to every table it is invited to.

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