Gandhinagar: Mr. Piyush Goyal who had visited GIFT City at Gandhinagar and interacted with officials on Saturday morning said the imported gold will be distributed from GIFT City to other parts of the country.

GIFT City will be nominated as an agency to import 200 tonnes of gold from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) under the recently signed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the middle-east nation, said Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, during his visit to Gujarat last Saturday.

“I have take a decision which profits GIFT City and its expansion. Recently, we signed an FTA with the UAE. This agreement has come into force from May 1 under which almost 100 per cent of items exported to the UAE will go as duty-free. We have also allowed some items to be imported from the UAE with lesser duty. In order to encourage our gem and jewellery sector, 200 tonnes of gold will be brought at discounted rates to India. We will nominate GIFT City as the agency to import the gold,” said Mr. Goyal during his interaction with media persons at iHub, a student startup and innovation hub in Ahmedabad.

Mr. Goyal who had visited GIFT City at Gandhinagar and interacted with officials recently, said the imported gold will be distributed from GIFT City to other parts of the country. “This solves a big problem of middlemen faced by the gem and jewellery sector. Due to these middlemen, gold purchases used to be expensive. With today’s decision, we have solved their problem too,” he added.

“Barring 40-50 items, all other 11,000 odd items exported to the UAE will be duty-free,” Goyal said. Under the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) signed in February 2022, India has allowed a one per cent duty concession for gold imports from the UAE upto 200 tonne of inbound shipments.