India’s Quality Ecosystem at a Crossroads: A Living System in Need of Transformation

A review of RIS Discussion Paper #336 - Reimagining India’s Quality Ecosystem by Rajeev Kher, Anil Jauhri and Om Stutee

The very title of this new discussion paper from India’s Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS) deserves a moment’s reflection. To reimagine something is to do more than reform it - it is to reconceive it from the ground up. And to speak of a quality ecosystem rather than a quality infrastructure is itself a statement of intent. An ecosystem is not a machine with components to be tightened or replaced. It is a living, interdependent system - one that can flourish, stagnate, or fall out of balance when its conditions change. That framing matters enormously for understanding what Kher, Jauhri and Stutee are actually proposing.

A system under visible strain

The paper opens with a candid catalogue of recent failures. The withdrawal of recognition of India’s organic certification system by the United States, the European Commission’s (EC) removal of key Indian certification bodies from its approved list, persistent quality concerns in the pharmaceutical industry, and the high-profile uproar over ethylene oxide (EtO) contamination in spices - these are not isolated incidents. Taken together, they point to a system that has grown in scale and scope without developing the institutional coherence needed to sustain credibility at the global level.

“While India has much of the necessary infrastructure in place… the question is whether it is leveraged effectively and cohesively to promote national interest.”

The authors are careful not to dismiss what India has built. Significant progress has been made over the past decade: the revision of the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) Act in 2016, the release of the Indian National Strategy for Standardization (INSS) in 2018, the Consumer Protection Act revision of 2019, and a concerted push to align domestic standards with International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), Codex and World Health Organization (WHO) norms. The foundation exists. The problem lies in how the edifice sits upon it.

What the GQII tells us - and what it doesn’t

An reference point, noted in the paper, is the Global Quality Infrastructure Index (GQII). In the most recent edition, based on 2025 data, India ranks 11th globally out of 185 economies - a result that reflects genuine strengths. In accreditation, India places 7th; in standardisation, 8th. These are remarkable positions for an emerging economy and speak to decades of institutional investment.

India in the Global Quality Infrastructure Index 2025

Overall ranking: 11th out of 185 economies

Accreditation: 7th

Standardisation: 8th

Metrology: 31st

Source: GQII, gqii.org. Rankings based on 2025 data.

Yet the metrology ranking - 31st - hints at an imbalance within the ecosystem. Strong accreditation and standardisation bodies cannot function to their full potential if the underlying measurement infrastructure is comparatively weak. This points to an important methodological lesson: the GQII is an invaluable starting point for benchmarking a national quality ecosystem against global peers, but it should be the beginning of analysis, not the end. It identifies where a system stands; it takes a paper like this one to explain why - and what to do about it.

The structural fault lines

The paper’s core analytical contribution is its diagnosis of systemic governance failures. These are not technical deficiencies so much as institutional design problems - the accumulated legacies of a model developed for an earlier stage of India’s economic development. The authors identify four principal fault lines:

• No nodal authority. No single institution provides a whole-of-government perspective on standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment. The result is fragmentation, with the Department of Commerce (DoC), the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), BIS and the Quality Council of India (QCI) each operating within narrow mandates.

• Blurred roles and conflicts of interest. Regulatory and voluntary functions remain entangled across institutions. Bodies simultaneously responsible for promotion and regulation, or for accreditation and conformity assessment, face structural conflicts of interest that erode credibility.

• Weak sector-wide oversight. The EtO contamination case is the authors’ clearest illustration: a contaminant migrated from sesame seeds to organic produce to spices over three years, with each regulator responding within its own mandate - and no mechanism to coordinate a system-wide response. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) acted on spices, but a comparable response was absent for organic produce regulated under the National Programme for Organic Production (NPOP).

• Capacity and intelligence gaps. Laboratory infrastructure, training, consulting support, and regulatory intelligence on destination markets all remain underdeveloped, particularly for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) navigating an increasingly complex global compliance landscape.

The direction of reform

The authors’ recommendations follow logically from their diagnosis. At the institutional level, they propose a National Authority on Quality to provide cross-sectoral policy coherence - analogous, in spirit, to the role FSSAI played in consolidating a previously fragmented food regulatory landscape. Regulatory and voluntary functions should be separated more cleanly, with government progressively withdrawing from voluntary spaces and focusing instead on enabling policies and enforcement.

On regulation, the paper questions whether the BIS Act remains the right instrument for technical regulation in a mature economy - noting that no mutual recognition arrangement (MRA) involving BIS certification has yet been secured, despite successful precedents in export certification for seafood and organic produce through bodies such as the Export Inspection Council (EIC) and the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA). A dedicated legislative basis for technical regulation, or housing it under the Consumer Protection Act, is proposed as a more globally compatible alternative.

The international dimension is equally important. Rather than developing India-specific standards that risk market incompatibility, the authors advocate stronger participation in international standardisation bodies, sustained by domain experts rather than rotating government representatives. Where domestic regimes are not yet globally accepted, credible India-based certification systems - like the EIC seafood certification recognised by the EC, or APEDA’s organic certification scheme - demonstrate that there is an alternative pathway.

“Influencing international frameworks offers a more effective pathway than developing standards that are not globally compatible and may inadvertently create barriers for Indian industry in export markets.”

Relevance beyond India

This paper is written for an Indian policy audience, but its insights travel well. Many developing and emerging economies find themselves in a similar position: quality infrastructure institutions built during an earlier developmental phase, modelled on government-led approaches suited to limited stakeholder capacity, that are now under pressure from the complexity of global trade, the proliferation of private standards, and rising expectations from importing markets. The trajectory the authors describe - from government-dominated systems toward clearer institutional separation, stronger private sector engagement, and international alignment - mirrors the evolution that advanced economies underwent over several decades.

For policymakers in such contexts, the paper offers a structured analytical lens: begin with the GQII to locate your system globally, then conduct the kind of granular institutional diagnosis that Kher, Jauhri and Stutee undertake here. The numbers tell you where you stand. The institutional analysis tells you why - and what, specifically, needs to change.

A question for the QI community

The paper advocates a fundamental system transformation. Transformations of this kind can take years to materialise, and their effects are often diffuse and contested. This raises a practical challenge that the paper does not fully resolve: how do we know when the transformation is working?

In your view, dear readers - which indicators should be selected to measure the success of India’s quality infrastructure system transformation? Should they focus on institutional structure (separation of roles, reduction of conflicts of interest), on outcomes (international recognition of certification systems, reduction in trade rejections), on capacity (laboratory accreditation coverage, MSME compliance rates), or on something else entirely? We would welcome your reflections.

Reference

Kher, R., Jauhri, A. & Stutee, O. (2026). Reimagining India’s Quality Ecosystem. RIS Discussion Paper #336. Research and Information System for Developing Countries, New Delhi

Global Quality Infrastructure Index (GQII): gqii.org