The words on an Indian jewellery bill fall into five families: what the metal is, how the piece is marked, what it weighs, what the work costs, and what is set into it. Read a word into the wrong family and you pay for the same gram twice.
Purity comes first, because the rest of the bill is worked out from it: weight times purity gives fine metal, and fine metal times the rate gives the metal value. Everything after that is a charge somebody chose, all of it sitting under metal, purity and the bench.
Where this page and your own bill disagree, go by your bill
The same word shifts between a machine chain unit and a hand-work bench, and between one city’s sarafa and the next, so no glossary can tell you what a word means in your own shop. Every tool named below still starts from figures somebody at your counter has to give you. Where this page and your own bill disagree, go by your bill.
Purity — tunch, karat, fineness, 916, 750, 585, 925, 999, and how a hallmark states it
Karat counts parts in 24, so 22K is 22 parts gold and 2 parts alloy. Fineness counts parts in a thousand, which is where 916, 750 and 585 come from. Tunch, from touch, the touchstone test, is the trade’s own word for the same fact written as a percentage. Three ways of saying how much of the piece is the metal you are paying for.
All three are correct. Which one you hear depends on who is speaking: a karigar says tunch, a hallmark says fineness, a customer says karat.
| The mark, as it is stamped | Reads as | What it certifies |
|---|---|---|
| 916 | 22K | 916 means 91.6% gold — 22 karat, the everyday Indian jewellery standard. |
| 750 | 18K | 750 means 75% gold — 18 karat, the usual choice for diamond and studded pieces. |
| 585 | 14K | 585 means 58.5% gold — 14 karat. |
| 999 | fine | 999 is fine metal — 99.9% pure, used for coins and bars. |
| 925 | sterling silver | 925 is sterling silver — 92.5% silver, the worldwide jewellery standard. |
Fine metal sits beside purity but is a weight: the grams of pure gold or silver inside the piece, and what an exchange or a karigar settlement counts in. Alloy is everything else.
A mark states what the piece was certified at. Across your counter today, a touchstone streak, a karat meter and acid each read something slightly different.
The mark itself — the BIS lozenge, the purity grade, and the six-character HUID that belongs to one piece
Three things, and the third is the one you get asked about: a current BIS hallmark on gold carries the lozenge, the purity grade and the HUID.
The BIS lozenge is the standards mark: the Bureau of Indian Standards’ own symbol, saying the piece passed through a recognised assaying and hallmarking centre. The purity grade sits beside it, written as the karat and the fineness together, so a 22K piece reads 22K916. The HUID is a Hallmark Unique Identification code of 6 characters, laser-etched next to the grade.
That code belongs to one piece alone, so two identical bangles carry two different HUIDs. Anyone can check one free in the BIS Care app, your customer included.
BIS issues the HUID; you issue your SKU, for your tag and your stock register, and the two never have to match. Your own codes get built on the SKU Scheme Generator.
Hallmarking is compulsory for gold jewellery sold in India and voluntary for silver. The scope of the gold order has widened in stages, so read the current scope off the BIS page, where it carries a date.
Weight — gross, net, tola, pavan, bhori, ana, masha, and the two different rattis that catch everyone
On a stone-set piece, read both weights off the bill and take the difference. Gross weight is the piece as it sits on the scale: metal, stones, the lac filling inside a hollow piece, thread, findings, everything. Net weight is the metal alone, and what is left between them is stone weight — the line nobody reads.
That gap is where money moves, because a percentage charged on gross weight is a gold percentage charged on stone. Which basis a quote uses is its own question, worked out in rupees, and it is the thing to settle before any percentage on this page is agreed.
Then the regional units, still how plenty of shop books write a weight.
| Unit | In grams | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Tola | 11.6638 g | One tola is 11.6638 g — the standard Indian gold unit. |
| Pavan | 8 g | One pavan (sovereign) is 8 g, the common South-Indian gold unit. |
| Bhori | 11.664 g | One bhori (vori) is 11.664 g, used in eastern India. |
| Masha | 0.972 g | One masha is 0.972 g — a twelfth of a tola. |
| Ratti (jeweller’s) | 0.1215 g | The jeweller's ratti is 0.1215 g — an eighth of a masha. |
| Ratti (gem trade) | 0.182 g | The gem trade's ratti is 0.182 g. A stone weight written in ratti and a gold entry written in ratti are not the same unit. |
Ana is the smaller Bengal unit, a sixteenth of a bhori, and it turns up in old family registers. Its grams come off the converter below, so you never have to hold the fraction in your head.
The ratti is the trap, and it catches experienced people: one word, two units, on exactly the bills that carry both metal and stones. Write the grams beside whichever ratti your book means.
Charges — making, wastage, VA%, ghat, kaat, mazdoori, hallmarking charge
A rupee figure per gram, a percentage of the metal value, or a flat amount for the piece: making charge is the price of turning metal into a piece, and the three quotes sit on three different scales until you bring them onto one.
Mazdoori is the same money said at the bench: the karigar’s own charge for the labour, quoted per gram or per piece, sitting inside the making charge a customer sees.
Wastage, and VA or value addition, are the percentage form — wastage the North convention, VA the South one. Many bills carry a percentage and a per-gram figure at once, which is why the only fair comparison is effective making as a share of the metal value.
Ghat is loss at the bench: metal that went out with the issue and is missing from the piece that came back. Kaat is a cut, an amount taken off a figure at settlement, on paper, by agreement. A slip that files both under one word leaves you no way to check either.
Both go past what a definition can hold, and the full treatment is in the words on your karigar’s slip. What each is allowed to be depends on the work and on what you agreed, which is why the trade has no standard percentage to hand you and why it belongs in writing on the day the metal goes out.
The hallmarking charge is what the assaying and hallmarking centre takes for marking the piece, charged per piece and passed on to you. It belongs on its own line, separate from making and from wastage. BIS publishes the current fee; ask for it as its own number on the quote.
Then the tax words. A jewellery bill either carries 3% on the metal and stones with 5% on the making charge, or one rate across the whole piece — and what decides it is the supply, not the layout. A finished piece handed over ready-made is one supply at the goods rate on the whole value, making included, however the bill sets it out; the two rates belong to making supplied as a service in its own right. The calculator above totals a piece both ways, and which of the two your bill should carry has its own page under this pillar.
The bench — karigar, burada, job work, the challan it moves on
The metal stays yours the whole way, and that one fact sets every other word in this section. Karigar is the maker: the bench hand who takes it and returns a piece, outside your payroll and outside your supplier list.
Burada is the filings: the dust and clippings that come off your metal while the piece is being made. It is still your gold. Settle whether it comes back to you on the day the metal goes out. What the bag is worth after refining is just maths, and the Scrap & Melt Estimator does it line by line.
Job work is the legal name for the arrangement: metal sent out to be worked on and brought back, without a sale happening at either end. It sits under section 143 of the CGST Act, which is also where the period for bringing the metal back is set. The conditions for sending it out, and the statement the sender files, sit in rule 45 of the CGST Rules. Your CA reads those two against your own book.
A challan, more fully a delivery challan, is the document metal travels on when it is not being sold, and it cannot stand in for a bill. Write its number against the issue entry in your book, so the paper and the slip point at each other.
Kachcha and pakka describe the paper, not the deal. A kachcha slip is the bench’s working note, good between the two of you and nowhere else. A pakka bill is a numbered tax invoice. Only one of them survives a dispute.
Stones — melee, sieve size, kundan, polki, jadau, CZ, lab-grown
Nobody prices the stones in a pave border one at a time. Melee is the small diamond stock used where many little stones sit close together, in pave and in border work, and it is bought and priced by the parcel.
Sieve size is how a melee parcel is described. The stones are graded through sieves, so a parcel is quoted as the millimetre range between two of them, and how many stones make a carat follows from that range. A carat is 0.2 g and splits into a hundred cents, which is why melee is talked about in cents.
Kundan names two things. Strictly it is the highly refined gold, worked in strips, that holds a stone in place without heat; in shop language it is also the style that technique produces. If a quote says kundan, ask which is meant.
Polki is an uncut natural diamond: flat-backed, unfaceted, often foiled from behind so the light comes back as a glow. It is real diamond, not a substitute. Jadau is the craft that sets both, stones pressed into soft gold as it is worked.
CZ is cubic zirconia, a man-made stone standing in for diamond, and the tag says CZ. It is also the heavier of the two, so a CZ outweighs a diamond of the same width across the top, which is why Carat From Dimensions asks which stone it is looking at before it estimates.
Lab-grown is diamond grown in a laboratory: the same material, a different origin, a different price. Write the word on the tag, on the bill and in the listing, because a buyer who learns it later is holding a description you wrote yourself.
Plating and imitation — micron, flash plating, base metal
Fill the base-metal field first. Base metal is what the piece actually is underneath: brass, copper, an alloy, or silver on better stock, and on a marketplace it is the field that contradicts a title most often.
Micron is the thickness of the plated layer, one micron being a thousandth of a millimetre — a measure of how much gold sits on the surface, with how pure that gold is a separate question.
Flash plating is a deposit laid down in seconds, thin enough that what you are buying is the colour. Anti-tarnish, rhodium and e-coating name finishes over a plating, which slow the tarnish without adding gold.
None of this is hallmarked, and it cannot be: a hallmark certifies the purity of the gold or silver in a piece, and plated brass has none to certify. Getting the title to agree with the base-metal field is a marketplace problem, and one of the four families behind a rejected catalogue.
Words each shop settles for itself — chhut, wastage, net weight, same-to-same, making free, bhav
Chhut is the clearest case. It names a concession, and which concession is a shop-by-shop matter: metal loss allowed, money off the rate, or a rounding at the end of a settlement, with a slip rarely recording which one it meant. So the question is what the chhut sits on, and it comes before how much.
Four more behave the same way. Wastage in some shops means only the metal actually lost, and in others the whole value addition. Net weight can quietly include or exclude findings and thread. Same-to-same, said of a copied design, promises a likeness nobody has written down. Making free, on an offer board, is free of a making charge that was set by the same shop offering it.
Bhav, the rate, moves every morning, two shops on the same street can quote it differently, and the figure your city bills on comes off the local sarafa association board that day. Ask which board a quote is taken from, and at what time.
Take your last bill out tonight and mark it up. Beside every percentage write which weight it sits on, beside every weight write the purity, and circle any word this page did not define. Those circles are your questions for the counter tomorrow.