If you have Gold Jewelry or Bars or Coins and you want to convert it to cash it is perfectly legal to do it. Do not go to a jeweler. He will only be interested to sell his jewelry and happily take your old jewelry and sell you new jewelry. He will not give you cash. You may find some jewelers offering cash for jewelry, they are not very clear in their dealings. If you want to sell gold for cash go to an accredited Gold re-seller and re-cycler.

Digital Gold or Physical Gold: Which is a better investment?

Let me tell you the types of Gold you may own and how it will be treated.
These contain 99.9% pure Gold. You can convert it to cash at the rate of Gold on the day. However you will be charged a 3% service charge. e.g. you have a 10 gm gold coin ( sealed and issued by a Bank ). Let us say the rate of Gold is Rs 3000 per gram. Then the value of the coin would be Rs 30,000. However if you sell it you will ger Rs 30,000 – Rs 900 ( 3% of Rs 30,000 ) = Rs 29,100.

Hallmark Gold

Hallmark Gold ( In the year 2000 Indian Gold Jewelers adopted the BIS ( Burue of Industrial Standards ) Hallmark. It ensures that jewelry grade gold is made and sold at 91.6% purity. ( Why, 91.6%? Because purere Gold is too soft to retain its shape when worn as a jewelry. So if you sell Halmark Gold your Gold should have a valuation of 91.6% of the days rate of gold, but you get a 3% service charge deducted from the valuation. That is the gold is valued at 88% of pure gold. Their reason is that if they want to extract 99.9% gold from Hallmark Gold they will lose 3% Gold in the extraction process. So a 10 gm Hallmark Gold at Rs 3000 per gram will value to 91.6% of Rs 30,000 = Rs 27480 – service charge of Rs 948 ( 3.16% of Rs 30,000) = RS 26,532.

22 Carat or 18 Carat Gold.

Prior to 2000 Indian jewelers did not have any standard for gold used in Jewelry. The gold they used was mixed with silver and copper to attain the hardness needed to make jewelry. The resulting alloy could have varying percentages of Gold. The Karat is a metrics for measuring the fineness or purity of Gold. It has a weird formula to come to the following definition.

18k purity = 75.00%

22k purity = 91.66%

So how do you determine the value of your gold is not sealed as a biscuit by a Bank.

The answer is the spectrometer which can make an assay of the surface purity of the gold jewelry you want to convert to cash.