An ISI okay for luxury labels: What’ll we think of next?
Reports this week in Mint on the government’s new quality-control orders on high-end luxury shoes from Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior included the gem that the shoes certified appropriate for pampered Indian women’s feet would be mandated to have an ISI stamp (a sign of Indian Standards Institute approval) to embellish them. This sounded like a comic skit of the new licence raj, written not by Kafka but by those who made Carrie Bradshaw and her love of swanky Jimmy Choo shoes a key theme of the TV series Sex and The City. Such certification is impractical.
As happens so often, it is unclear what it’s protecting, since Indian footwear factories overwhelmingly focus on the mass market. Just recently, Maruti Suzuki’s R.C. Bhargava said that his company had no problem with a free trade agreement with the EU as Maruti’s cars were more than competitive on value-for -money with European cars.
In any case, the prospective buyer for a Benz or a BMW is unlikely to be sizing it up against a Baleno. Industry insiders say the latest quality certification move on shoes is directed at imports from China. So much of our industrial policy, from import licensing for computers to shutting the door on trade agreements that would make us part of East Asia’s supply chains, is influenced by this goal with little effect thus far on our bilateral trade deficit with China.
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