The Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution, Ashwini Kumar Choubey in a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha on Friday informed that Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), the National Standards Body of India, formulates Indian Standards in various sectors.
Through its standards, BIS ensures quality consciousness amongst manufacturers, industry, consumers & various government departments. These standards benefit industry of any size and across all sectors by ensuring efficiency in processes and quality of products/services, help in adoption of new technologies, build productivity, reduce costs and enable access to markets.
The standards also provide a range of other benefits including facilitating trade, providing investment confidence, fostering innovation and supporting government policies and regulations. These National Standards are developed with the objective of harmonious development of the activities of standardisation, and quality assurance of goods and articles. Till date, 21,890 Standards for products, process specification, service sectors, code of practice, methods of test terminologyhave been published by the BIS.
As a policy, while developing any Indian Standard, BIS technical committees consider the availability of an International Standard (International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on the subject.
The committees try to align the standard with the International standards to the extent possible At times, ISO/IEC standards are not adopted in totality by the concerned technical committee taking into account the country specific concerns on health, safety, environment, national security and prevention of deceptive practices. At present, 87% of the Indian standards are harmonized with ISO/IEC standards for which the International Standards exists.
Government of India has identified twelve Champion Services Sectors (CSS) in the Indian National Strategy for Standardization (INSS) for focused attention so as to realize their full potential. These Champion Services Sectors include:
- Information technology and information Technology Enabled Services (IT & ITeS)
- Medical Value Travel Services
- Transport and Logistics Services
- Tourism and Hospitality Services
- Accounting and Finance Services
- Audio Visual Services
- Communication Services
- Legal Services
- Construction and Related Engineering Services
- Environmental Services
- Financial Services and
- Education Services
Considering this and to give due importance to the services sectors, the Standards Advisory Committee(SAC) of Bureau of Indian Standards created the Services Sector Division Council in the field of services sectors. The Division Council is functional since 2020.
The Central Government has also notified several products mandating BIS Standards in view considerations like human health/ safety, protection of environment, public interest etc. During the last 03 years, 197 products have been notified by the Central Government for compulsory BIS certification.
