Washington, DC – The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) renewed their commitment to Indo-US cooperation on standards and conformity assessment by signing a renewed and expansive Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the conclusion of a roundtable on Standards in Washington DC on September 22, 2015.
Commenting on the developments, Joe Bhatia, President, ANSI said that the expanded MoU between CII and ANSI would cover new areas such as Smart cities & infrastructure, Renewable Energy, Water & Sanitation while also enhancing the scope of the Standards Portal that was created by both organizations in partnership with the Indian Bureau of Industrial Standards in 2007.
Highlighting the several CII Centers of Excellence on Quality, Sustainable Development, Green Business and Food & Agriculture (FACE), Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII invited ANSI and the various organizations to work closely with CII in scaling up industrial standards in India. He further pointed out that CII has also launched initiatives like the Standards Conclave with the aim to help India reach global standards on its own volition which would in turn help the country integrate better into global supply chains and the world trading system.
Sumit Mazumder stressed that technical regulations and standards have begun occupying a very significant space in the global value chains agenda as global fragmentation of production is essentially a division of specialized tasks. Ongoing bilateral and multilateral treaties and mega-regionals have mandated the adoption of technical regulations, directly or indirectly, to do business with any major trading partner thus making it vital to work towards adopting a stronger standards, in compliance with global requirements.
Providing insights into the successfully concluded first ever US-India Strategic and Commercial Dialogue, Arun Kumar , Director General of the US and Foreign Commercial Service and Assistant Secretary for Global Markets, US Department of Commerce, stressed that a major part of the discussion focused on Standards. “I applaud CII and ANSI for their leadership in expanding and renewing their MoU which will greatly help bring greater focus on industrial standards within the bilateral commercial relationship, said Kumar.
The roundtable was attended by officials from various organizations such as Department of Commerce, Standards Services Division, NIST, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials (IAPMO), Underwriters Laboratories (UL), ASTM International among others.