Overview
- The Bureau of Indian Standards hosted a meeting in Bengaluru on Thursday where BRICS national standards bodies finalised and signed a long-pending MoU to create a formal cooperation mechanism among the 11 member NSBs.
- The MoU establishes routines for information sharing, joint drafting of standards, technical cooperation and capacity building and directs members to coordinate at international bodies such as ISO and IEC.
- India pushed artificial intelligence standardisation as a priority at the two-day meeting and led a multi-country workshop that brought experts from India, Russia, China and Brazil to discuss standards for safe, transparent and trustworthy AI systems.
- BIS said closer alignment on technical rules is intended to cut compliance costs, reduce technical barriers to trade and improve acceptance of member exports while most NSBs signed the pact and the remaining bodies pledged to complete domestic approval procedures.
- The drive builds on a BRICS process that began in 2022 and on India's recent domestic moves to expand mandatory quality controls and harmonise roughly 23,700 national standards with ISO/IEC norms, a shift that could boost New Delhi's influence in global standard-setting.