You may find this hard to believe, but the household electric bulbs we buy today are made to standards that are 28 years old! The mandatory standards being followed by bulb manufacturers were formulated by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) way back in 1978. Even though the standards were subsequently revised in May 2004 and brought on par with international standards, manufacturers are most reluctant to accept them and are forcing the BIS to postpone its enforcement.

In fact, barring one important safety test called the “safety at the end of life”, the standards were to have been brought into effect from this month, but following representations from small scale industries, the BIS has postponed its implementation.

This is not the first time that manufacturers’ interests have taken precedence over consumer interest. Now you must have noticed that sometimes when you switch on the light, the bulb fuses with a loud bang. And worse, it bursts out of the socket and comes hurling down like a rocket. While sometimes the entire lamp comes crashing down, spewing glass pieces all around, sometimes only the glass bulb comes apart and the cap remains inside the socket. If you are standing just below the bulb when it bursts, you can well get hurt.

When the BIS reviewed, revised and upgraded its standards in 2004 in line with international standards of quality and safety, it also took into consideration the threat posed by the bursting of the bulb, particularly at the end of its life and introduced the “safety at the end of life” test. However, since this test required certain laboratory facilities that were unavailable at that time, BIS fixed January 2007 as the deadline for implementing the safety test. As for the rest of the new standard, it set July 2006 as the date of implementation. And now, that has got postponed.

It’s been a long road to standardisation of bulbs in the country and consumers have played an important role in it. Bulbs are supposed to last 960-1000 burning hours, but we had bulbs that would fuse within just two to five hours of burning. Following consumer protests, the government brought them under mandatory certification in 1989, but that did not really help because of slack implementation. It was again consumer pressure that got the government to tighten its control over manufacturers and force them to improve quality, thereby setting the stage for the next phase of improvements. And now yet again, it is only consumer demand that can force manufacturers to follow the new standards.