As the government is shaping up a ten-year mission plan (2012-22) for the electrical equipment (EE) industry, the Chinese experiment with standardisation of the sector offers some lessons for India.

The proposed mission plan is a product of necessity stemming from an ironic situation of domestic under-capacity in some segments and overcapacity in others, amidst rising imports, especially from China. This is happening just when India has planned massive capacity addition in the power sector. Still the future is of overcapacity in all segments, if projected investments come through. The Rs 110,000 crore (2010-11) industry is targetted to reach $100 billion by 2022. To save the industry that employs 15 lakh, directly (5 lakh) and indirectly, from under-utilisation, India is looking at a 4% share in global EE trade by 2022, from 0.8% share of exports now.

Though the task is not easy, an enterprise-oriented approach could work, going by the clues that the Chinese leave.

One major step that China had taken to upgrade its EE industry was to set the manufacturing standards. In the early ’90s, in a long-range standardisation plan running through 2010, the State Bureau of Technical Supervision envisaged that by 2000, all ISO and IEC standards should be converted to China?s national standards.

In the new century, with its entry into the WTO, China stepped up the adoption of international standards. ?In July 2002, seven ministries and top commissions came together and issued ‘the Opinions on Pushing Forward Adoption of International Standards’, requiring governments at all levels to implement the standards?, according to a China-EU document.

In 2004, the China Electrical Equipment Industry Association set up a standardisation committee comprising industry leaders, research institutions, industrial experts and ‘technical committees of standardisation for various electrical sectors.’ The 120-strong committee had 40 persons from 31 enterprises and 21 from 18 electrical institutions, along with 54 experts from technical committees of standardisation for various sectors.

All this shows at what scale the Chinese have worked on the issue. By September 2008, there were 1,485 active national standards centrally administrated by the electrical industry?accounting for 6.2% of the total national standards?among which 310 were mandatory standards (20.9%), 1,159 were recommended standards (78%) and 16 were technical guides for national standards (1.1%). There were also over 400 national standards under development then.

A key feature of China’s standardisation process is that all segments of the industry and research and technical institutes are actively involved in framing the standards. Largely, it is the industry which is developing the standards with the help of academia, and not necessarily the government. (The document lists three professors who have ?obtained the IEC1906 awards for their outstanding technical contributions to the preparation of international standards of industrial electroheat equipment.?)

Though this is only about standardisation efforts, it shows how to go about planning for industrial ascendance.