Govt to ramp up benchmarking campaign

Frequent flyers face heavier luggage at airports than at home. The government is recalibrating scales, setting standards for various devices

It’s a problem many frequent flyers will be familiar with: luggage weighs more at the airport than it does at home.

The government has made a list of eight items. (Sunil Saxena/HT Photo)

In December last year, the Union government actually sent out an advisory to states and Union territories, asking them to recalibrate and stamp luggage-weighing machines at all airports following a spike in complaints of discrepancies by passengers to the ministry of consumer affairs.

The flyers claimed their luggage weighed less at home but more at check-in counters.

Back in 2020, during a routine inspection at Jaipur airport, officials from the state’s legal metrology department found three carriers were using a type of weighing scale not recommended for use by commercial airliners, leading to fines.

Although the Bureau of Indian Standards, a federal agency, has ramped up its benchmarking campaign — from soft toys to e-rickshaws — many commonly used consumer items have yet to be standardized for testing and other parameters, including weighing scales.

To bring more goods under set specifications, the ministry of consumer affairs has now picked about eight widely used items for which standards and rules meant for calibration, testing and verification are being formulated, said Nidhi Khare, Union secretary of consumer affairs. The process should be completed by year-end, she added.

The items include weighing scales, breathalysers used by police, blood-pressure monitoring devices or sphygmomanometers, household energy meters, water meters and home-installed cooking gas meters. New calibration specification will apply to both locally made products as well as imported ones.

Benchmarks are also being designed for two critical commercial devices, moisture meters and checkweighers, an end-of-assembly-line device. “Moisture meters play a critical role in prices farmers get for their produce and are extensively used by agricultural traders. Reliable testers will improve farm incomes,” Khare said.

Farm traders as well as the Food Corporation of India, the Centre’s grain-handling agency, use moisture meters to ascertain the quality of grains, which dictates the price. The FCI, which purchased 26.6 million tonne of wheat this year, uses hundreds of moisture detectors to verify if the grains being bought are of “fair and average quality”, a threshold set by the government.

“In case a faulty reading shows higher moisture content in wheat or rice, it can reduce the price commanded by farmers because more moisture means poor quality,” said Vikash Telia, a grain trader in Punjab’s Khanna Mandi, Asia’s largest grain market.

Khare said since breathalysers are routinely deployed by traffic police of all states to detect drunken driving, accuracy is vital. The decision to include breathalysers was taken because poor equipment calibration can result in serious legal consequences, the official said.

Calibration and testing standards of energy meters, which directly impact consumers, are another major market requirement, according to the consumer affairs ministry.

With the country increasingly switching to pre-paid smart meters under a national programme, consumers in many states have flagged issues with energy meters. Smart pre-paid meters are being installed under various federally funded schemes as well as by state utilities in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Bihar and Rajasthan among others.

In Assam, many consumers alleged inflated electricity bills after switching to pre-paid meters, prompting protests. The government then ordered the state’s electricity regulator to ascertain the veracity of the complaints. The Centre has been funding states to implement smart metering under National Smart Grid Mission and the Integrated Power Development Scheme.