May 26, 2007	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 09, 1428

LAHORE, May 25: Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority director-general Abdul Ghaffar Soomro has said the Pakistan Standards Strategy and Action Plan is on the anvil to respond to developments in the field at home and abroad.

He was speaking at the concluding session of a two-day US-Pakistan Standards and Quality Assessment Workshop here on Friday afternoon. Planning Commission member Dr Shaukat Hamid Khan was in the chair.

Mr Soomro said standardisation and quality issues relating to environment, social responsibility, healthcare and food safety required to be resolved for international and regional trade by evolving regulatory and policy framework to harmonise the Pakistan standards with the international standards by ensuring increased participation of public and private sector in the process through incentives.

He said strengthening of national standardisation infrastructure was necessary in terms of finance and human resource in view of globalisation of markets, emergence of new business sectors, faster product development and shorter product lifecycles and increasing convergence of technologies. As the global system developed, the business community would look for more strategic partners to cope with the challenges of divergent standards, he added.

He said formulation of national standards was carried out in sectional committees comprising PSQA experts, representatives of related production units and consumers. Efforts were made to ensure that national standards safeguarded national interests and satisfied all stakeholders. The standards strategy would accelerate the national standardisation system by focusing on transparency and customer needs. The standards would be developed on the basis of globally accepted principles of transparency, openness and impartiality.

He said industrial standards would be developed on sectoral basis and benefits of standardisation would be brought to wide attention with the help of targeted marketing, sustained public relations and other informative measures. Continuous government support would be ensured for development of standards in the form of allocation of resources.

Speaking on ISO certification scenario in Pakistan Engineer Zafar Chaudhry said standards could be enforced through government legislation, public-private sector linkage or on voluntary basis.

There was collusion of industry for ignoring the standards where the consumers associations were weak.

He said International Standards Organisation was established in Geneva in 1947 but the first company in Pakistan got ISO certification in 1994. The ministry of science and technology established an ISO Cell in 1997 and offered incentive of Rs200,000 to encourage it. There were more than 18 certification bodies, more than 100 consultants and 1,000 quality auditors in the world but Pakistan had only one certification body with no quality auditor.

He said only the multinationals and the companies forced by customer requirement or looking for undue benefit of incentive had opted for ISO certification. Nearly 3,000 companies had got ISO registration so far but there was no improvement in quality of products because of lack of commitment of managements to quality assurance. The number of certified companies was decreasing because they were not going for surveillance for quality assurance after certification.

Syed Shahid Mustafa said motorcycle production had achieved 90 per cent deletion with the increase of production from 100,000 in the year 2000 to over 700,000 at present. The industry was expected to start getting the remaining 10 per cent parts manufactured locally during the next three years.

The participants recommended restructuring of the PSQA and introduction of accountability in it. They also stressed the need for upgradation of the HV & SC Laboratory, Rawat, and making it independent of Wapda. They also called for creating a database of testing laboratories of manufacturers engaged in exports and products approved by international testing laboratories And certification bodies.