The Quality Council of India (QCI) and UL, an independent, global safety science company have brought together government agencies and industry associations to further the quality ecosystem in the country through standardization in medical devices.
Chaired by the Ministry of Commerce and moderated by the Quality Council of India and UL, the Standards Roundtable saw active participation of government agencies such as the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) and the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), and 16 industry associations representing diverse sectors, as well as premier industry bodies such as the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) and Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham).
A critical agenda of the Standards Roundtable was the draft Indian National Standards Strategy (INSS) released by the Ministry of Commerce recently. The draft INSS focuses on, among other objectives, ‘using standards as an enhancer for competitiveness in the domestic and international markets’ and ‘adopting best practices in standardization, conformity assessment and technical regulations, and creating an integrated infrastructure, roadmaps and institutions for their effective management’.
While India today has more than 19,000 standards, around 5,000 of them are updated and about 135 are mandated for regulation. A phased approach to increase the level of regulation to match other comparable markets will give the domestic industry the right impetus to compete on global as well as domestic scale.
Commenting on the first-of-its-kind effort by the Government to devise a comprehensive Standards strategy, Anil Jauhri, CEO, National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies, India said, “The Government is actively pushing the Standards agenda, and hopefully, with the draft INSS, where the roles of each stakeholder are clearly defined, we can create an action plan to further standardization in India with greater participation from the industries.”
Other strategic discussions in the event under the theme, “Accelerating Standards Development For Building Brand India” centered around speeding up the process of creating domestically relevant, technologically sound, science-based and globally harmonized standards that can foster better safety, sustainability and healthy outcomes for the country. Experts reiterated the need for the industry to proactively support the standardization program of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).