Government privatises Weights & Measurement Department

Confederation of All India Traders is concerned with the gazette notification ‘Legal Metrology Act, 2009’, notified on September 5, 2013. This notification spells out that government’s intention to handover the critical governance issue of monitoring of weights and measures to big corporate players who will operate ‘as Authorised Testing Centres’, working on behalf of government. Weights and measures being an integral part of trade, any decision by the government will need a careful scrutiny by the traders. The move to certify the weights and measures by private ‘Testing Centres’ will also take consumers for a ride as the reliability and confidence on private testing centres will always be a big question mark.

 

CAIT National President Shri B.C.Bhartia and Secretary General Shri Praveen Khandelwal said that this notification is an encroachment on the rights of State Governments since legal meteorology is under the domain of State subject.  As of current practice the responsibility of periodic verification and certification of all the weights and measures was with the Special Verification Agency. This was a government agency. With the current notification, the SPA will be replaced by private authorized testing centres. These testing centres will have ‘modern facilities’ and will be operated by ‘corporate entities’ in different parts of country.  As per the announcement made by the government all such testing centres will be attached with Indian Institute of Technology where the operations will be carried by the private employees of corporate companies.

 

With the setup of ‘approved testing centres’ managed by private corporate players, the fate of government employees working with SPV is at stake. It will also lead to revenue loss both at Centre and State as the large chunk of fees will go as service fees for conducting the tests. Earlier any fee collected for certification of weights and measures were deposited in government treasury.

 

The new proposal of setting up of authorized testing centres has fundamental mismatch like working standards of agency, control and authority to issue license to manufactures still lies with the government. Since all the key functions are to be performed by the government authorities, then the need to appointing a private agency for enforcing the act and in return making profit needs to be questioned. This looks as a governments policy to support a corporate business plan at the cost of national exchequer.  CAIT urges government to continue with the existing setup and may go ahead with modernization. Modernisation does not means that government gives all revenue centric activities to corporate players. We urge government to explain the Legal Metrology Act, 2009 and rational behind change of government operation of certification to certification by private players.