V.K. SEHGAL, deputy director of Bureau of Indian Standards (eastern zone), met readers of The Telegraph at his office on Thursday. Participants included Sandip Banerjee, S. Sengupta, Dipak Kujur, Animesh Ghosal, Arunangshu Maity and Jitendranath Das

Sandip Banerjee: What is the scope of function of your organisation in protecting the benefits of consumers?

Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is the apex national body that determines the standard of products available in the market. Actually, when manufacturers make a product, it is intended that they will abide by certain specifications or parameters to ensure the quality. In reality, however, it depends largely on the whims of manufacturers to provide consumers with a quality product.

Here comes the necessity of a third party certification on behalf of the government to ensure that consumers are getting quality products. Our organisation works as the third party. We certify a product after testing and finding it fit for the market. We collect samples randomly from a factory or a manufacturing unit and test them in our laboratory.

Once the quality is found to be conforming to the standards laid down by our standardisation committee, we issue a licence to the manufacturer.

Sandip Banerjee: Reputed companies manufacture thousands of products. How do you test all of them?

We do not check all products manufactured by a company. Instead, we choose at random a few samples. Besides, we also have a process of certifying the quality control system of various manufacturers.

Once we certify the quality control system of a particular company, the firm tests its products itself and brings to the market only those that are found to be conforming to the standards laid down by the government. This is known as ?self-certification?.

Animesh Ghosal: Is it mandatory for a company to get a standardisation certificate from BIS before marketing its products?

Certification has two categories. In voluntary certification, a manufacturer approaches us to check the quality of its products and obtains a licence.

The other type is mandatory certification. Of the 1,145-odd products we cover, 120 are in the category of mandatory testing. Of these, nearly 30 per cent of the products ? including biscuits, pressure cookers, safety razors, dry batteries and sports goods ? are used regularly by the people. If any organisation wants to manufacture any of these products, it should first get a licence from us.

Dipak Kujur: How can the certification mark help a consumer?

This is only applicable for products that do not figure on the mandatory certification list. When a consumer buys such a product, he has to choose between items that do not need certification. But if a company markets such a product using the voluntary certification scheme, the consumer gets an assurance about the quality.

S. Sengupta: How can a consumer get redressal from your organisation after buying a faulty product bearing the ISI stamp?

If a product bearing the ISI mark turns out to be of inferior quality, the consumer may inform the manufacturers about it. If the company fails to respond, he may lodge a complaint with our director of consumer affairs and public grievance. For this, it is mandatory to provide details of the product, name of the shop from where it had been bought and a valid proof of the transaction. Besides, the package on which the ISI mark was imprinted should be preserved.