He added that the technical committee of BIS is taking up the matter at its next meeting in. BIS, he said, has some European standards on the subject for comparison, which will be referred to before the local standards are devised.

Though gradation is available for ordinary portland cement (OPC) in various categories such as 33-grade, 43-grade, 53-grade, BIS has so far not stipulated any standards for blended cement which is essentially a OPC with a mixture of pozzolonic materials such as fly-ash or slag to a certain percentage.

As the entire cement market has been coverted into a graded cement market by sustained marketing of the manufacturers, the producers of blended cement are finding it difficult withoutgradation. for some time now, they have been demanding that blended cement be graded like OPC.On the standardisation of the gold jewellery, Das said that BIS has almost finalised the documentation and the new standards will be in place from July end. Here again BIS examined other standards in Europe, the UK and Geneva besides receiving inputs from jewellers in mumbai, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Bangalore. The standard would be made compulsory for export purposes, but within the country the option would be left with jewellers.

The BIS hasplans of networking its 19 offices in the country at a cost of Rs 7 crore. It has harmonised more than 600 standards. It is taking measures to provide the same to industry through CD Roms and hard copies as a first measure to do away with complaints of standards not being available on demand. In three months the standards will be available on the electronic media.

The BIS has also taken on the responsibility of briefing the industry on the latest internationalstandardisation requirements, again to be provided swiftly on demand. In view of the speed of technology development, and standards constantly changing, BIS has got the facility to dip into the international technical information services through the GATT enquiry point.

At any given time the domestic industry could get in touch with BIS to find the international standards prevailing in a certain country for a certain product, which would again be disseminated through the electronic media.