GS Paper II

News Excerpt:

BIS DG has pitched for a Machine Applicable Readable and Transferable (SMART) approach for making Indian standards easy to read and understandable for all stakeholders.

About the news:

• The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) conducted a two-day workshop on Digital Transformation in association with BIS.
• 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.
• It discussed the rollout of project SMART and how India can participate in it.
• India is one of the largest standards-making bodies in the world, having more than 22,000 standards.
• The SMART standard initiative of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

What are Standards?

• These are essential for quality and risk management; they help researchers understand the value of innovation and allow manufacturers to produce products of consistent quality and performance.
• They provide instructions, guidelines, rules or definitions that are used to design, manufacture, install, test & certify, maintain and repair electrical and electronic devices and systems.

Challenges with the current standards:

• 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.
• Micro and Small sectors, which form over 80% of the BIS licenses, find it difficult to comprehend the standards due to their technical complexity.

Benefits of SMART:

• Enhanced relevance: Smart Standards empower IEC and ISO to deploy digital solutions catering to the diverse requirements of stakeholders, spanning industry, regulatory bodies, end-users, and society.
• Tailored content: The forthcoming IEC and ISO standards offer precisely timed, customised content for humans and machines.
• Streamlined development: Manufacturers can seamlessly integrate Smart Standards across their product and service life cycles, expediting development while reducing costs and ensuring compliance with current regulations.
• Efficient content creation: Standards developers can optimise content creation with modern authoring tools, automating processes throughout the development lifecycle.
• User-centric standards: End-users benefit from dynamic digital standards tailored to their specific needs, continually updated to ensure relevance.

Way Forward:

• There is a need to explore ways to make standards easily readable and accessible for diverse stakeholders.
• Machine interpretability and machine readability are possible answers to make standards easy for all stakeholders to read, access, and interpret.
• The SMART standards will give an effective answer to the challenges the current standards are facing.