Standards certification for products and services concerning health, safety, and environment to be made mandatory

Bureau of Indian Standards Bill, 2016 passed by the Parliament yesterday, is a major step forward in ensuring high quality products and services in the country. The provisions in new Bureau of Indian Standards Bill, will promote a culture of quality of products and services through mandatory certification and also through voluntary compliance of Indian standards. The Bill was passed by Rajya Sabha yesterday after getting the nod of Lok Sabha on 3rd December, 2015. Some of the salient features of the bill are:

• The Bill empowers the Government to bring any article, process or service, which it considers necessary from point of view of health, safety, environment, prevention of deceptive practices, security etc, under the mandatory certification regime.  This will help consumers to get quality products and will also help in preventing import of sub-standard products;
• In order to supplement ease of doing business by limiting unnecessary field inspections, the Bill has provisions for self-declaration of conformity of the Indian Standards for certain categories. Simultaneously stringent penalty provisions have been made for violation of compliance to the standards which include imprisonment up to two years or with fine up to ten times of the value of goods produced or sold, or with both.
• As per provisions of the bill, BIS can now order recall of products, not confirming to the standards, in addition to cancellation of the license of the manufacturer.
• BIS can also order compensation to the consumers in case goods and services do not conform to the standards.
• The Bill empowers the Government to implement mandatory hallmarking of precious metal articles such as Gold and Silver.
• As the service sector in the country has grown and now become major part of the economy, so to ensure quality of kea services such as health services, education services now services and systems have also been included under the standardization regime in addition to articles and processes.
• The Bill positions the Bureau of Indian Standards as the National Standards Body.