A newspaper clip has gone viral on social media with a caption claiming that the Modi government has mortgaged 200 tonnes of gold from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) abroad secretly.
The headline of the newspaper reads: “RBI का 200 टन सोना चोरी छुपे विदेश भेजा गया.” (English translation: “200 tonne gold of RBI silently sent abroad.”)
The link to the post can be seen here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did the fact-check, and found it to be misleading.
On searching with appropriate keywords, we found a similar report published by National Herald on May 10, 2019. The report claimed that the Modi government secretly transported 200 tonnes of the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) gold reserve overseas immediately after coming to power in May 2014. According to the report: “An investigative journalist by profession, Navneet Chaturvedi, reached at the conclusion after filing an RTI seeking information on the existing gold reserves of RBI last year and through the study of central bank’s annual reports. The scribe-turned-politician claims that the missing 200 tonne gold is the same which was bought by the Indian government from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2009.”
However, we found that RBI has a record of sending 268.01 tonnes of gold abroad in its half-yearly report management of Foreign Exchange Reserves on October-March 2017- 2018. The report reads: ” The Reserve Bank holds 560.32 tonnes of gold, of which 268.01 tonnes are held overseas in safe custody with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Gold as a share of the total foreign exchange reserves in value terms (USD) stood at about 5.0 per cent as at end-March, 2018.”
We also found that RBI published a report on May 3, 2019, and clarified that the claim was false. In a press release, RBI clarified, “We have come across reports in certain sections of the print and social media regarding RBI shifting abroad a part of its gold holding in 2014. It is a normal practice for central banks world over, to keep their gold reserves overseas with central banks of other countries, like Bank of England, for safe custody. It is further stated that no gold was shifted by RBI from India to other countries in 2014 or thereafter. Thus the media reports cited above are factually incorrect.”
Hence, we can ascertain that the viral claim is misleading.
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