With effect from 3 July, under the Electronics and Information Technology Compulsory Registration order 2012, 15 categories of electronic and IT products such as laptops, tablets, scanners, wireless keyboards and games will be banned in the Indian market if these products are unable to meet BIS safety standards. On the request of industry body Manufacturers Association for Information Technology, the deadline was extended by three months, which was earlier 3 April.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013: The companies have just a fortnight in hand for meeting the deadline for approval of certain kinds of electronic goods. But looking at the pace of implementation process by the Bureau of Indian Standards, IT hardware makers say that this could result in severe shortage in supplies. Moreover, it seems this time too the deadline won’t be met as applications and test results will not be cleared on time. The slow process of providing registrations will impact almost 80 IT hardware manufacturing companies.
“We are only about a fortnight away from the deadline and only one registration has been granted by BIS yet,” said JV Ramamurthy, President of MAIT. Products falling in the notified category will not be allowed to be sold or imported without BIS approval after 3 July. Amar Babu, Managing Director of Lenovo India and Vice President of MAIT said that looking at the progress made so far, the industry will come to a standstill if the deadline is not extended.
The decision of compelling manufacturers to get BIS certification is laudable. “It will curb the imports of low-quality hardware into the country, giving better traction to genuine product manufacturers,” said S Rajendran, Chief Marketing Officer at Acer India. Failure to register applications by July 3 by BIS will result in huge losses for the industry. “What wrong have we done that we can’t sell our products despite submitting the test results to BIS on time?” asked SN Rai, Cofounder and Director of Lava Mobile.” “We submitted test results of three of our tablet models with BIS a month back. In fact, we were one of the earliest to do so. But, we haven’t heard back from BIS yet,” he added.
So far, registrations have been granted to a Samsung printer model and Sony LCD TV by BIS. Though, the government agency claims that it has only 27 applications and 100 test reports with it, MAIT insists that 1400 products have been submitted for testing and test results of 400 are still with BIS.
Electronics Bazaar, South Asia’s No.1 Electronics B2B magazine
