Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said there is a “desperate need” for India to ensure high quality standards for goods, since increasing tariffs or imposing quantitative restrictions alone cannot completely prevent “poor quality and undesirable imports.”
“Unless we have set standards, it is not going to be possible for us to stop unwanted and undesirable imports. There is no way in which just tariff measures are going to be sufficient to stop such imports which we do not desire,” Ms. Sitharaman said at the ‘National Standards Conclave 2016’ organised by the Commerce Ministry along with CII.
Ms. Sitharaman said that the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) had a lot of “catching up” to do in terms of setting up technical regulations (or mandatory standards) to ensure that Indian consumers get good quality products. The minister’s observation assumes significance as it comes in the backdrop of allegations of a surge in imports of sub-standard goods from countries like China. She said BIS needed to speed up its work with the ministries concernedto ensure matching high standards for locally-made and imported items.
