The primary role of the Pakistan Standard and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA), a federal body, is to formulate industrial standards and consequently ensure their implementation across various industrial concerns and services. Industrial standards not only underpin the quality of products and services but also provide for their interchangeability, interoperability, safety, and environmental friendliness.
To safeguard the health of domestic consumers, PSQC is working to ensure the supply of 179 compulsory items, including food, building materials, electronics, automobiles, cosmetics, tyres, motorcycles, CEG rickshaws and internal compression lubrication engine oil, as per required standards. According to PSQCA officials, they have developed more than 6,000 standards, some have also been adapted, while in various fields, such as food safety, energy saving and environmental protection, more than 24,000 standards have been adhered to. Further, PSQCA has established labs in various cities to ensure the implementation of standards in various industrial sectors and services.
The PSQCA also has the mandate to enhance Pakistan’s export potential and is taking vigorous steps to make Pakistani products conform to global requirements. For instance, it is establishing strict standards for halal product exports to various Islamic countries. Thus, PSQCA’s role, in a holistic manner, is not only to protect the health and safety of domestic consumers but also to strengthen the competitiveness of Pakistan products in global markets through the adoption of national standards and ensuring that these standards are compatible with the international standards, where needed. To improve its capacity and help exports, PSQCA has signed MoUs with standard formulation bodies of various countries.
However, lately, PSQCA has been has been in the news for its failure to perform its mandatory role. Recently, the Senate Standing Committee on Science and Technology deliberated on the functions and performance of the PSQCA. The committee questioned PSQCA for its failure to maintain standards in the country while accepting that PSQCA lacks resources such as basic equipment in the labs to check and monitor standards implementation by the industry. It was pointed out that PSQCA has fined the cement industry for compromising standards in previous years, but the fines have not been collected to date. Similarly, it was suggested that the PSQCA should establish a mechanism for in-house evaluation to assess its performance.
Thus, so far, PSQCA is measuring its performance through how many standards which have been developed, adopted or adhered to. And it has established labs to check products and services for standards adherence. However, the PSQCA mandate would be better served if it divests its testing services to suitable universities’ labs, which could be tailored to PSQCA’s needs. This would free up resources to help PSQCA monitor and evaluate the performance of various industrial sectors on standards adoption, the primary objective of PSQCA. Moreover, customer satisfaction with industrial products and services could be another aspect of PSQCA’s performance. For instance, if after adopting standards customers are not happy, it should be probed to help PSQCA improve its performance. Also, there is no robust feedback mechanism on why industries are reluctant to adopt standards, which are supposed to improve their efficiency and competitiveness, meaning greater profits for the industry. A study on such a feedback mechanism would help to improve the performance of PSQCA.
Finally, and most importantly, there is tacit knowledge and non-tacit knowledge: whatever is written, coded, and explained is tacit knowledge such as standards, and standard operating procedures. However, all tacit knowledge is underpinned by ‘doing of things’ (non-tacit knowledge). All multi-national organisations have R&D departments, which are in contact with research universities to generate new knowledge through research and experimentation. While R&D organisations and universities publish the results of experiments and declare their breakthroughs, but how these breakthroughs were brought about (non-tacit knowledge) is kept as company secrets. Thus, while PSQCA is enforcing tacit knowledge, it is not helping the industry understand non-tacit knowledge underpinning the tacit knowledge: understand standards, interpret them and then implement them. Therefore, cooperation of engineering and business universities may be solicited to help the industry understand and adopt standards. Thus, divesting services such as lab testing facilities, incorporating the role of universities, and improving the feedback mechanism of customers would go a long way in improving the performance of PSQCA.
Ahsan Munir
The writer is a freelance columnist.