The Hindu Business Line : Panel soon to evolve standards for IT sector

EXPERT-TALK: (From left) Mr M.N. Vidyashankar, Secretary, Dept of IT & BT, Karnataka; Mr Rakesh Verma, Addional Director General, BIS; Mr Harish K Grama, Vice-President, India Software Labs, IBM Corp; and Mr Venkat Kedlaya, Chairman, Events Committee, MAIT; at a seminar in Bangalore on Thursday. - K. Gopinathan

Bangalore April 12 The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has announced plans to form a group of 30 organisations that would help build standards for the IT sector. The BIS is a national standards body that promotes standardisation, marking and quality certification.

Ten organisations each from IT, academia and user groups such as NGOs, Railways etc, will collaborate. The group would be formed in ten days' time, said Mr Rakesh Verma, Additional Director General, BIS, speaking at a seminar on Information Technology Standardisation organised by apex body Manufacturer's Association for Information Technology (MAIT) in the city.

Harmonising Standards

"The first exercise will be to identify documents on standards floated at international level and adopt them. The second would be to identify few areas where we could make our own standards," said Mr Verma.

Industry experts meeting at the seminar spoke on the need for harmonising standards in the country with international ones, and collaborating to form new ones which would "free" users.

Technology sovereignty should be ensured by the standard, said Mr Jaijit Bhattacharya, Adjunct Faculty, IIT Delhi and Country Director, Government Strategy, Sun Microsystems.

"Around 1,500 national standards have been formulated in domains such as consumer electronics, information security, data storage and safety of electronic products. However, only 75 per cent of these are harmonised with international ones," said Mr Sukh Bir Singh, Deputy Director General, BIS, said.

The future of IT services depends on adopting global standards. Standards form the basis of SOA (service oriented architecture) and Web services, said Mr Harish Grama, Vice-President, IBM Software Lab India. Open source featured in most speeches on standards used in e-governance. "Policymakers should see what is important to the citizens before setting standards," said Mr Venkatesh Hariharan, Head-Open Source Affairs, RedHat India.

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