SMART Standards: BIS DG's Vision for Easier Access

New Delhi, Jan 23 (PTI) Bureau of Indian Standards Director General Pramod Kumar Tiwari has pitched for Machine Applicable Readable and Transferable (SMART) approach for making Indian standards easy to read and understandable for all stakeholders.

At a two-day workshop on digital transformation that concluded on Tuesday, the BIS DG said in his inaugural address that experts and industry stakeholders are not able to participate in the standard formulation because the standards are "voluminous, highly technical and not easy to read".

"This problem becomes even bigger when we look at the Indian landscape, which is dominated by small and micro sectors. More than 80 per cent of the licenses the BIS has granted are to micro and small sectors. They find it very difficult to make sense of the standards," he said.

There was a need to explore ways to make standards easily readable for the diverse range of stakeholders, he said.

With the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) creating awareness about standards at the grassroots level and conducting training for village panchayats, Tiwari said it is important to write standards that are easily readable and accessible.

"We have nearly 2.6 lakh village panchayats in the country. We are conducting training for them as they play an important role in the execution of government programmes. The challenge is how they can understand the standards. I believe the SMART standards will give an effective answer to the problem we are facing," he said.

The machine interpretable and machine-readable is the possible answer to make standards easy to read, access and interpret for all stakeholders, he added.

The BIS DG also welcomed the SMART standard initiative of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

The workshop, conducted by the IEC and ISO in association with BIS, discussed the rollout of project SMART and how India can participate in it.

BIS is one of the founding members of the ISO and IEC and has been actively participating in both technical and policy levels of these two international bodies since its inception in 1948.

India is one of the largest standards-making bodies in the world, having more than 22,000 standards.

The workshop saw active participation from the ISO Central Secretariat, IEC Secretariat and several ISO member countries, including Japan, South Africa, Germany, and the UK, among others.