An attempt to hedge against impossible odds.

 "India's glitter fixation has always been evident in the country's appetite for gold," wrote an editorial in the Mint. During the lockdown due to the coronavirus epidemic, "Stuck at home, people turned to digital gold in large numbers." "India is the largest consumer of gold in the world," wrote Kripananda Chidambaram. "Roughly 700 tonnes or 33% of total gold mined in the world is consumed in India."  The government does not like it because, "When we import gold we need to pay in foreign currency and we roughly require USD 60 billion worth of dollars." This puts downward pressure on the rupee and raises the price of oil. Also, "Other financial instruments like fixed deposits, investment policies, shares, bonds etc are a great source of productive funds for corporate and government bodies creating positive impact on the economy." "Not to own any precious metals is to trust politicians and central bankers," said investor Marc Faber. "Just look at the two US presidential candidates and the case for owning gold in clear." Gold is not a hedge against inflation or stock market crashes, wrote Jared Dillian. "Gold is a hedge on government authorities making poor economic choices." "Gold has significantly outperformed stocks this century, gaining 555% versus 79% for the MSCI All-Country World Index of stocks and 146% for the S&P 500 index." Governments love easy money at low interest rates which allows them to run deficits by borrowing. "So, if investing in gold is a bet on authorities doing the wrong thing, the best way to diminish the allure of gold is to run balanced budgets." "Retail inflation surged to a 77-month high of 7.61 percent in October", while "manufacturing sector output posted a decline of 0.6 percent". The last meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Reserve Bank (RBI) left the key interest rate at 4% which means that real interest rate is negative and millions of households are staring at an alarming erosion of their savings, wrote Shayan Ghosh. "India is a country of savers and not much investors. Only 2 percent participate in equity markets directly or through mutual funds, and there is almost zero direct participation in bond markets," wrote Rajas Kelkar. Along with suppressing interest rates the RBI would rather devolve bond sales than allow yields to reflect market borrowings. This means getting lower returns on government bonds. As for shares, "Public shareholders of Lakshmi Vilas Bank (LVB) will lose their money as the entire amount of the paid-up share capital will be written off as per the scheme of amalgamation of LVB with DBS India proposed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)." With the government adopting any means to destroy our wealth, Indians see gold as the best hedge against the plunder. So taxes on gold have been hiked to 13% plus 5% GST on making of jewellery. Which makes smuggling extremely lucrative and an estimated 200 tonnes get smuggled into India. Indians are not stupid or lawbreakers. Just trying to protect their meager wealth.