India Expands Food Testing Infrastructure to Boost Exports

New Delhi, Jan 1 (PTI) The commerce ministry's arm Export Inspection Council (EIC) is planning to expand the country's food testing infrastructure in a holistic way to boost outbound shipments, a senior government official said.

To prepare a plan for this, the EIC has initiated a detailed study on gap assessment on food testing infrastructure for exports.

"Though we have taken a number of measures, we are doing a more deeper analysis commodity and area-wise. We are trying to find out gaps in our food testing infrastructure. We hope that the study will be over in 2-3 months and after that we will come up with a full plan of how to expand our infrastructure in a more holistic way," Joint Secretary in the Department of Commerce Nitin Kumar Yadav told reporters here.

EIC is an advisory body to the central government. It notifies commodities which will be subjected to quality control or inspection prior to export; establish standards of quality for such notified commodities, and specify the type of quality control or inspection to be applied to such commodities.

The EIC is also set to launch an integrated traceability module to streamline and manage processes involved in inspection, testing and certification for exports, he said, adding that they are adopting advanced technologies like IoT-based sampling techniques.

New laboratories are coming up in Ahmedabad, Faridabad and Mangalore, he said.

Further, the EIC is signing mutual recognition agreements (MRAs) and MoUs for different products with different countries so that the EIC's mechanisms and processes are recognised the world over.

It helps exporters cut transaction costs.

"We are aspiring that India do MRAs. We are also understanding requirements of other countries and we are developing capacities so that we can have MRAs with them," Yadav said.