India, Feb. 6 -- 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 example, has an underlying business that is an asset or a loan that generates an income. There is a price for gold because there is demand. The same can be said for many metals, and now crypto-coins, that have no use by themselves but have a price because there is a demand. Gold stands apart simply because of the collective memory of it being an asset that has survived the pressures of time and has remained a store of value - something that does not lose value over the long sweep of history. India treats gold as an asset for all practical purposes. The Reserve Bank of India owns around 880 tonnes of gold as a part of India's reserves - or liquid assets that are acceptable to other countries. Gold is taxed as an asset, with long-term capital gains at 12.5%. Gold is used as collateral to raise loans and the organised gold loan market is a huge Rs.15 trillion. The unorganised market might be even larger. But there are three numbers that treat gold as hair oil - a consumable. As if the minute a housewife buys jewellery, it goes from being an asset to being a "personal effect". It is true that gold jewellery loses 25-30% of its value due to "making" charges, and is not the best way to invest in gold. However, even after the making charges are accounted for, the rest is still precious metal and is good enough to be used as collateral when she uses it to secure a loan. One, on the consumer price index (CPI), gold is treated as an item under "personal care and effects". Gold comes clubbed along with items such as soaps, shampoos, and hair oil. Including gold in CPI has distorted India's inflation numbers during the current bull run in gold prices. India's CPI has been overstated, giving wrong signals to the interest-rate setting RBI. Hopefully, this anomaly is corrected in the near future as the Expert Group Report on Comprehensive Updation of Consumer Price Index has recommended that gold and silver jewellery be moved out of the CPI. That it has taken independent India till 2026 to have such a recommendation is in itself a commentary on the Indian statistical machinery. Two, gold imports distort India's current account numbers. Gold imports are treated as imports of goods and services and not of an asset. The capital account records foreign portfolio and direct investments and other "assets", but gold is seen as a consumable. This distorts India's balance of payments negatively when gold imports surge. This too needs a rethink. Three, global per capita wealth and inequality numbers usually ignore gold ownership by households focusing on financial assets and property. The UBS Global Wealth Report 2025, for example, defines net worth or wealth as the value of their financial and real assets, less their debts. Real assets considered are principally housing. But this is an incorrect valuation of household wealth. Indian households owned around 34,600 tonnes of gold as of June 2025. At a current valuation of $163 million per tonne, this is a total household wealth of $5.6 trillion, or almost $3,800 per person. It is useful to see how the Indian GDP is at $4.19 trillion and per capita income is $2,900 compared with the wealth that an average Indian household owns. Gold ornaments, coins and bars are a common item of exchange during weddings and other occasions. The gold worn on the person of domestic workers sometimes outshines that worn everyday by others who might have financial assets or tote branded bags that masquerade as assets. There is clearly a need to rework the way gold is accounted for in our inflation and balance of payment data. When India imported global norms of accounting at Independence, we were of no account in the world in economic terms. In 2026, that story has changed dramatically. Viksit Bharat must write its own rules taking into account its wealth realities. India should also develop its own wealth metrics that account for ownership of gold and informal assets that are not valued on stock markets but are a part of the individual asset basket. Gold prices are high today due to a reset in the global order. We should use the attention the yellow metal is getting to change our data systems and wealth metrics....