Tuesday, June 18, 2013: The electronics industry is seething under pressure. It is being expected that the sale of products like laptops will be facing a sort of blackout starting next month.
Department of electronics and information technology said that companies are facing issues in selling or importing electronics goods into the country without being certified by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS). Despite extending the deadline by three months and having received 1,500 applications so far, BIS has registered only one product.
A senior official of a PC manufacturer shared with Business Standard on condition of anonymity, “A complete licence raj has been unleashed on the industry by way of this compulsory registration, which is neck-deep in bureaucratic red tape. The delay is worrying the industry no end.” He added that test reports of products, which were globally certified before worldwide launches, were being returned with a “volley of questions”.
Showing the growing concern, J V Ramamurthy, president of the electronics hardware industry body Manufacturer’s Association for Information Technology (MAIT), said that the government either has to extend the deadline or face the day when industry won’t be able to import or sell any product after 3 July.
Ramamurthy further added, “Since the list of products required to be certified includes major items such as notebooks, tablets, plasma and LCD television sets, along with printers and scanners, the turnover of companies is expected to be severely impacted.”
“The department introduced the Electronics and Information Technology Goods (Requirements for Compulsory Registration) Order late last year to check the sales of substandard and spurious electronic items in the country, which were considered not only to be a health hazard but also a security risk. To start with, the government had notified a list of 15 products as requiring compulsory registration with plans to notify other products as well as components in later stages,” the Business Standard report further quoted.
Clearing its stance, a BIS official told Business Standard that various components, along with each product application, had to be critically examined, hence the delay. “Every report is 40-50 pages long, which has to be looked into minutely. Even if companies can’t meet the July 3 deadline, if they have submitted the test report, they can continue to sell the products till October by which time the registrations should be completed.”
Electronics Bazaar, South Asia’s No.1 Electronics B2B magazine
