Resources

Expertise

DESIGN EXPERTISE

The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), previously known as the Indian Standards Institute or ISI, is entrusted with keeping national engineering codes up to date and in line with current world technological standards.

However, as the national R&D organisations (eg. the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) or the All India Medical Research Council (AIMRC)) are in the public sector, they are viewed as parts of the civil service. Commerce and industry largely ignore them.

Therefore, BIS has had to copy elements from foreign codes and call them Indian standards. It is probably influenced by nationalist politics as much as by scientific development. Regrettably then, in the fields of steelwork for buildings and bridges at least, little of use has been done over the last 40 years.

For example the steel bridge codes used by the railways refer to a copy of BS-153 parts 1 to 4 – 1962 edition. It is hardly up to date. Moreover, the steel structures for building construction codes  – ISI-800 – remain a copy of BS-449 (dating from 1975).

Limit state theory to BS-5950 has only recently been introduced. There are no steel or composite bridge codes in India similar to BS-5400 parts 1 to 10 for steel, concrete and composite bridges.

The same is probably true across the other engineering disciplines.

These codes will be valid in the UK until 2010. After this, pan-European codes will become obligatory and national codes will be archived.

Once India becomes familiar with British Standards and, say, complementary documents published by the UK Highway Agency, local engineers can begin familiarising themselves with the Eurocodes.

For general structural engineering – steel, aluminium, concrete, masonry and timber – there are 62 such Eurocodes covering subjects from bridges to buildings, grain silos masts and towers. They cover fundamentals such as dynamic seismic response for loads and the buckling of thin plates due to the interaction of inplane stresses.

It has taken 19 European states, including non-EU members such as Switzerland and Norway, 25 years to draft these documents. To reproduce them in an Indian version would be futile.

Were nationalist politicians to argue against the adaptation of these Eurocodes (modifying factors of safety to satisfy Indian quality control standards, perhaps) then one could argue that Indian manufacturers have already adopted international standard codes.

The Indian power generation industry has gained an international reputation, not only through their skill and management of quality control but also through the adoption of American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) for welded pressure vessels. American Society of Automotive Engineers (AAAE) standards have worked well for indigenous car producers and they even use Euro II and Euro III standard for emissions controls.

If the codes are good enough for them, they should be good enough for the rest of Indian engineering.