Sreelatha Menon: The cleaning machines

Private certifying agencies are gaining popularity with industry, which had been against them till now

In these testing times, when reputations are becoming more and more vulnerable, there’s a need for a modern day agni pareeksha, or some kind of test, and certification, to come out clean.

Of late, industry, which always has horror stories of exploitation ready to tumble off cupboards of supply chains, has been spawning mechanisms to audit and certify its work as ‘clean’ or ‘bad’.

Since damaged reputations are hard to repair, these agencies are supposed to do a thorough job. The certificates help the companies enter the global markets with confidence. Many foreign testing and inspection companies have set up shop in India and count top multinational and Indian compnies as clients.

Take Tuv Sud, a German company, which has been testing and certifying products and manufacturing processes for many companies in India and helping them decide if their goods are fit for exports.

It recently found contamination in honey, around the same time that NGO Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) did. Of course, Tuv Sud’s findings are only for companies which hire it, like Himalaya, Dabur and Walmart. Its South Asia head Ishan Palit said the company’s findings were similar to CSE’s. Whether this made any company stop some exports or not, it won’t tell. Next, Tuv Sud is going to put Pepsi through pesticide tests before anyone else does it.

It is not just the quality of the final goods, such as automobiles, food and garments, that these companies approve. They also look at compliance with labour laws and other human rights standards.

Tuv Sud global CEO Alex Stepken says the birth of the company dates back to 1886 when a pressure vessel exploded in a beer brewery in a German city, killing many workers. Many breweries and other companies then handpicked their best engineers and formed an association to test all other vessels and create safer technologies for companies.

Later, every German city had a chapter of this association and now this model has been adopted in Europe in general, says Stepken. Tuv Sud is owned by the same association, he says.

Tuv Sud has even private customers as clients, for instance, in Turkey and Germany, where people hire it to inspect their vehicles for safety.

“We are the eyes and ears of buyers and factories,’’ says Stepken. Tuv Sud has four food labs and one textile testing lab in India. Its clientele has grown 25 per cent, or by 1,500, in the last three years, and a majority of it is in food, leather and garment sectors.

Today, its clients include Bharti Walmart, Reliance, Tesco, Metro, Himalaya, Dabur, Dominos and Pepsi. It is currently organising workshops for supply chains in the garment industry to improve awareness about sustainable business and good labour practices. Says Palit: “We are telling manufacturers that it makes good buinsess sense to keep workers happy rather than being constantly on the lookout for new untrained ones.”

There are many such mini private inspectorates in the country starting from KPMG to the German Rwtuk Ahglantechnik, Japanese Nippon Kaiji Kentai and Societi General De Surveillence Sa.

When there is international buyers’ pressure, the companies are forced to abide by the standards. But when consumers are not international, what can compel companies to abide by labour and quality standards? Since institutional mechanisms for inspections have been subverted to a great extent through policy and corruption, what else can make local industry abide by these standards? The fear of a hell fire certainly cannot do the trick.