The Quality Council of India, jointly on behalf of the National Accreditation Board for Certification Bodies (NABCB) and the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Russian accreditation body, the Federal Accreditation Service (FAS), on 11 Dec 2014 during the 15th India-Russia Summit in Delhi. The MoU was signed by Adil Zainulbhai, Chairman, QCI and Savva Shipov, Head, FAS and the documents were exchanged in the presence of Prime Minster of India Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The MoU envisages among other things acceptance of India’s conformity assessment by Russia and vice versa in a bid to minimize technical barriers to trade. This means that wherever the regulators are using accreditation as a means of accepting testing/inspection/certification, each country would accept the other’s accreditation and conformity assessment. This would facilitate exports from India based on testing/inspection/certification in India itself.