A new festive season study has put numbers to something Hyderabad’s jewellers have long said at the counter. The State of Festive India, Decoded, a cultural intelligence study by LS Digital’s Langoor with Quilt.AI, analysed search interest and online conversation across four cities, and Hyderabad’s numbers stand out. Gold accounts for 99.6 percent of the city’s analysed search interest around the festival, yet only 14.2 percent of written coverage, the widest gap among the cities studied.
The finding with the most money in it is about how Hyderabad pays. The study estimates that old gold funds 50 to 60 percent of jewellery sales in the city. A large part of what Hyderabad spends on new Diwali jewellery is, in effect, paid for with gold families already own. They carry in old bangles, chains and coins and trade them towards something new. These are research estimates from search and discourse analysis, not a sales audit, and we present them that way. Budget thinking dominates the city’s searches too: budget-stretching themes make up 95.6 percent of Hyderabad’s search interest, and the study records a general shift towards smaller purchases, coins and lightweight pieces instead of heavy sets.
That fits the Hyderabad market our readers know, from Laad Bazaar by the Charminar to the big showrooms, where exchange counters stay as busy as display counters in festival week and where gold is still bought together with pearls in the Nizami tradition. When old gold is the currency, the rate that matters most is not only today’s selling rate. It is also the value a jeweller puts on what you bring in, and that varies from shop to shop far more than the gold rate itself does.
Buyer takeaway: If you are exchanging old gold this Dhanteras, get it valued at two or three shops before you commit, and ask each one the same three questions. What per gram rate are they applying, what purity are they crediting, and what deduction do they take for melting or wastage? On a large exchange, those answers can differ by more than the day’s movement in the gold rate. Today’s Hyderabad rate is on our Hyderabad page.
Source: LS Digital, The State of Festive India, Decoded, reported by MediaBrief, 28 Oct 2026; cross-check: Storyboard18
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