Jury finalizes winners of 41st Indian Gem & Jewellery Awards

The jury of the upcoming 41st Indian Gem & Jewellery Awards finalized names of winners, during a meeting at Sofitel Hotel, Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai. The jury including Smt. Nirupa Bhatt, Managing Director (India & ME), GIA; Mr M Narendra, former CMD, Indian Overseas Bank; Mr. Pawan Bindal, Director, Dun & Bradstreet (D&B), selected winners in all categories.

The GJEPC 41st Annual Awards is exclusively open for GJEPC members. It felicitates excellence in performance by gems and jewellery exporters, value additions, and investment on R&D among other parameters during the year 2013-14. A proprietary quantitative model developed by D&B, will be applied to shortlist the award winners, based primarily on computation of composite scores. The final set of award winners will be chosen by an esteemed jury.

Altogether, 35 awards have been envisaged - 30 nomination based awards and 5 Felicitation awards. The categories include industry performance such as precious metal, silver, cut and polished diamonds, fashion jewellery, coloured gemstones and synthetic stone. The Council will also honour the top foreign buyers from across the globe, international trade associations and banks financing the sector. In addition to recognizing their global standards, GJEPC will award those who contribute to the overall benefit of the Indian gems and jewellery industry. Additionally, special recognition awards including woman entrepreneur of the year, best growing company of the year, apex awards to felicitate most socially responsible, innovative and best exporter, have been proposed.

"The industry has grown from a mere US$28 million in the year 1966 to US$ 35 billion in the last financial year. These awards will be a testimony of our commitment to the growth and development of the gems and jewellery industry.” said Mr. Vipul Shah, Chairman GJEPC.

The IGJA 2014 has been conceived to allow more ease in participation, transparency in judging and some new categories like the ‘First Generation Entrepreneurs’ category to encourage new entrants and the small, medium large category in diamond and precious metal to encourage entrepreneurship at every level and recognize MSME sector. The application criteria and export critieria have been minimized to allow a robust process, fair competition, clarity and transparency. D&B’s presence as a third party assessment will ensure the selection process progresses with inputs from an expert organization, thus bringing more transparency. Introduction of jury process, representing different fields will ensure judging on broader aspects. Based on the response of last year, GJEPC is continuing with 3 categories in the Awards this year, namely Most Innovative Company, Most Socially Responsible Company, Best Women Entrepreneur.

The awards ceremony will be held in Mumbai at Jamshedji Bhabha Theatre, NCPA on 10th October 2014.