India, Feb. 5 -- Is gold a consumable item or is it an asset? The question looks silly - of course, it is an asset. It has been a store of value over millennia and, in contemporary times, central banks own it as a part of their reserves. But policymakers and economists have treated individually-held gold as a consumable and excluded it from the asset list owned by households in many important numbers. Yet, the Indian household's ownership of gold has made global headlines over the years. India needs to rethink the way it accounts for gold in its national statistics and put pressure on global inequality lists to take note of the role of gold as an asset for the Indian household.

Gold, in itself, has no value. A stock or a bond, for exampl...