Manufacturing standards for LED should be "mandatory": Philips

Government should make "mandatory" manufacturing standards for LED lights meant to be used under the Prakash Path Yojana (PPY), Philips said today.
The government is running a national programme for installing LED bulbs for domestic and street-lighting in 100 cities by March, 2016.
Stating that products not designed keeping Indian requirements in mind would fail quickly and give a bad name to the energy efficiency programme, Philips South Asia CEO Harsh Chitale said, "... We are working as an industry with the government to say, please don't just make standards, make them mandatory."
Reminding about the "failure" of CFL scheme, he said, "Lot of boost came, but with that came lot of imports not confirming to Indian requirements and standards, and lot of them started failing and it took the programme back by two years."

He added, "But this time the government is doing it the right way, it has also come with all the standards, and all the LED products should confirm to it."
"Like in CFL when standards were made mandatory low quality imports stopped. We believe same will happen here, when they are made mandatory, those who have not designed products for India will not be able to comply and low quality imports will stop," he said.

Speaking on the side lines of the launch of Philips Hue- the web enabled home lighting system here, he said "...Pretty much all of what we are doing for Prakash Path is all made in India, so it also plays into our national agenda of Make in India."

He said, "We are part of it and and are supplying for Prakash Path Programme. In fact, when we met the Prime Minister that was one of the agendas about our involvement in Prakash Path. In fact one of the largest procurement that government has done for Prakash Path... 15 million LED lights was done from us."
"We have expanded our manufacturing capacity here, and it is fully designed in India, it is fully made in India and it is fully compliant to Bureau of Industrial Standards...." he added.
Philips Lighting today announced the launch of what it calls the world's most dynamic web-enabled LED home lighting system in India -"Philips Hue".

Hue is the next generation of lighting innovation that has redefined the possibilities of LED technology by integrating the digital light source with the Internet of Things concept, the company said.