Gold Karigars, Fertiliser Slogans, and the Knife Hidden Inside a Political Sentence

Acronyms used in this post:

LPG means Liquefied Petroleum Gas, the cylinder fuel used in many homes and small workshops.

MSME means Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise, the official bucket for small businesses that often includes workshops too small to have a lobby but large enough to be crushed by policy.

CAD means Current Account Deficit, the gap created when a country spends more foreign currency on imports and payments than it earns from exports and income.

ETF means Exchange Traded Fund, a market-traded investment basket that can track gold, silver, stocks, or other assets.

Gold dust clings to fingers in a way speeches never do.

That is what comes back when a leader says people should not buy gold for a year, or when policy makes legal gold suddenly more expensive in the name of conserving foreign exchange. The line travels through television as sacrifice. It reaches investors as allocation. It reaches the comfortable classes as something to discuss over tea.

Then it reaches South Sinthee.

I went to WWA Cossipore English School and lived near Dum Dum when I was a child. South Sinthee had its own texture: damp walls, divided rooms, narrow lanes, the smell of fish and metalwork, old houses repeatedly cut into smaller spaces until a room became an argument against air. In many of those spaces lived jewellery workers we called shekra.

Karigars.

Gold men, though not because they owned gold. That would be too tidy. They worked on it. They bent over it, soldered it, polished it, set stones into it, and spent their eyesight on ornaments that would later sit under bright showroom lights while a customer asked for something heavier.

That chain is what policy language often hides.

Gold is not only a yellow metal imported against foreign exchange. It is a human chain. Traders, showrooms, investors, banks, smugglers, and consumers stand on one side of the story. On the other side are artisans, polishers, furnace workers, delivery boys, small workshop owners, migrant families, and people whose main asset is a pair of trained hands.

Raise import duty from 6 percent to 15 percent and the newspaper may say CAD, rupee pressure, foreign exchange, and trade deficit. Those concerns are not fake. India imports a great deal of gold. Gold can drain foreign currency. A country cannot eat bangles when crude oil prices rise and ships near the Strait of Hormuz begin to behave nervously.

Fair enough.

But a decent policy asks the next question. Who pays first?

Not the family with coins in a locker. Not the investor who buys an ETF and calls it prudence. Not the politician whose austerity speech arrives with a convoy. The first chill often reaches the informal worker.

The karigar.

The man at the bench.

The man who cannot diversify into asset classes because his main asset class is his right hand.

If the government must discourage gold demand, it must also ask what happens to labour-intensive jewellery production. Do small workshops get working capital support? Are artisans visible in the model? Does policy separate speculative hoarding from craft work? Does anyone distinguish between a luxury purchase and the bench economy that depends on ordinary orders moving through the chain?

That invisibility is the wound.

In Bengal, jewellery work was never simply an industry. It was migration, caste, craft, apprenticeship, informal credit, family survival, skill, heat, and exploitation. There is no reason to wrap it in nostalgia. Many of those rooms were underpaid, cramped, disciplined, and hard. But they produced beauty delicate enough to make the better-dressed classes sentimental.

A person may spend a life making ornaments that signal prosperity without ever living inside prosperity.

There is the economy in one cruel little picture.

Then another slogan arrives: reduce chemical fertilizer, move toward organic or natural farming, cut dependence on imports.

Again, the words are attractive. Soil health. Self-reliance. Natural farming. Less overuse. Long-term repair. Put them in a row and they look well-behaved.

But crops do not respond to patriotic persuasion.

Fertilizer is not a moral defect. It is chemistry, timing, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, micronutrients, soil testing, water, pest pressure, yield expectation, procurement price, farmer debt, and the Indian habit of making the weakest person absorb the grandest theory.

Organic transition may be useful in many places. Natural farming may reduce input costs in some settings. Chemical overuse has damaged soil in many regions. None of that should be denied. But “go organic” becomes dangerous when spoken like a shortcut during a supply shock.

Ask Sri Lanka.

In 2021, Sri Lanka attempted a sudden national turn away from chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It was sold partly as an organic future and partly as a foreign exchange necessity. Then reality arrived in the field. Yields fell. Farmers suffered. Food prices rose. The policy was reversed, but crop calendars are not social media posts. You cannot delete a damaged season.

That is why the slogan angers me. Not because I dislike organic farming. I dislike magical farming.

Organic transition is slow work. Compost supply chains do not appear because a speech is morally confident. Bio-inputs do not scale overnight. Soil does not rebuild in a news cycle. Farmers cannot gamble national food security because oil, gold, fertilizer, shipping costs, and foreign exchange have all begun arguing at once.

Here in Calcutta, global crisis enters the room through a phone screen. Hormuz, Iran, oil, freight rates, rupee pressure, gold duty, fertilizer anxiety. A maritime choke point thousands of kilometres away can walk into a Kolkata kitchen and change the price of dinner.

A ship slows somewhere, and a farmer in Nadia worries about urea.

A duty rises in Delhi, and a karigar in Bengal waits for orders.

A leader says sacrifice, and the sacrifice looks around for the nearest poor person.

Political language often pretends the nation is one body. We must reduce. We must conserve. We must sacrifice. The sound is noble until you ask which part of the body is being cut.

The rich person’s inconvenience is not the poor person’s crisis. One postpones a purchase. The other loses bench work. One rearranges a portfolio. The other waits for an order that may not come. The same word lands as different wounds.

A serious speech would say: gold imports are stressing foreign exchange, so we will discourage unnecessary demand while protecting small jewellery workshops and artisans from sudden collapse. We will monitor smuggling. We will not punish the legal worker while rewarding the illegal channel.

A serious speech would say: fertilizer imports are vulnerable, so we will reduce waste scientifically. Soil tests first. Crop-wise plans. District-level advisories. Transitional support. Domestic production. Bio-input pilots where evidence supports them. No sudden purity theatre.

But seriousness is boring. It requires charts, district officers, agronomists, cooperative banks, storage, transport, compensation, and humility. It is inconvenient television.

So instead the poor are asked to carry visible virtue.

I keep thinking of those shekra workers from childhood: the small rooms, bent shoulders, exact hands, and the absurdity of beauty emerging from conditions that had very little of it. Perhaps much has improved. I would be glad to be wrong in the happiest way.

But when policy speaks about gold, it should remember the hands that touch gold before the customer does.

And when policy speaks about fertilizer, it should remember that food security is soil, season, chemistry, debt, rain, labour, and luck, all arguing in the same field.

A country is not built by asking invisible people to perform visible patriotism.

It is built by seeing them before the speech is written.