How can technical standards speed up India's clean energy and e-mobility transition? Illustrate with recent examples.

Technical standards are the invisible infrastructure that make clean technologies safe, interoperable and bankable. Fittingly, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) marked World Standards Day 2026 under the theme "Shared Vision for a Better World: SDG 7 (Clean & Affordable Energy)" [1]. Well-designed standards can speed up the transition, but only if they are enforced.

How standards speed up the transition

• Safety and consumer trust: common safety baselines lower fire and failure risks, which reduces buyers' doubts about new technology like EVs.
• Interoperability and scale: common specifications for chargers, cables and components let firms produce at scale. They also let any vehicle use any charger.
• Procurement certainty: standards bring uniformity in public procurement, so tenders for charging and energy assets compare like with like [1].
• Ease of Doing Business: BIS's shift "from regulation to facilitation" lowers compliance friction for investors [2].
• Market discipline: Quality Control Orders (QCOs) make certification compulsory. They grew from 14 (106 products) in 2014 to 156 (672 products) [3], which keeps substandard imports out.

Recent examples

• IS 19967:2026: covers EV charging cables up to 1,100 V AC / 1,500 V DC, including AC Modes 1–3 and DC Mode 4 [1].
• IS 19891:2026: covers e-cycles (EPACs) with a continuous rated power of ≤0.25 kW and a 25 km/h cut-off, plus anti-tampering rules. This makes low-cost last-mile e-mobility legitimate [1].
• Standardisation roadmap for sustainable agriculture and manufacturing, launched in 2026 [1].
• BIS Digital Standard Reader: converts standards into searchable "SMART" standards with Indian-language translation, which helps MSMEs adopt them [1].

Gaps to address

• New standards stay voluntary until a QCO notifies them. Anti-tampering rules also need on-road checks, not just factory testing.
• Slow certification raises input costs. The MSME relief (6 extra months for micro firms, 3 for small firms, and shared cluster labs) [4] should be built into future EV-component QCOs.

Standards turn clean-energy ambition into safe, scalable markets. Three steps would let BIS act as a true enabler of SDG 7 and Viksit Bharat: time-bound certification, phased QCOs for critical EV components, and a wider network of testing labs. This is the "Quality, Quality, and only Quality" vision set out on World Standards Day [1].