India has allowed handset makers another year to move from an older standard for certifying batteries to a new one. The decision, manufacturers said, will give them enough time to comply with the rule and reduce the time required to take products to the market.
The Bureau of Indian Standards has informed the handset companies that it will allow concurrent running of two battery certification standards — issued in 2012 and 2015 — till August 2017, after which only the latter one shall remain.
The previous deadline was September this year, which handset makers had argued left little or no time for compliance. This is because the new standards, though issued last year, were implemented only this June, leaving just a three-month buffer for the manufacturers to move from one standard to the other.
Gaurav Nigam, the product head at Lava International opined that the extra year would now help them to reduce lead time from five months to three months and also to bring new products to the market because they are getting the time to plan the implementation in a much better way.
By Baishakhi Dutta
