Over 30,000 substandard toys seized so far this financial year: Govt

Over 30,000 substandard toys have been seized so far this fiscal year by enforcement agencies, the government on Friday said.

In a written reply to Rajya Sabha, Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Piyush Goyal said: "In order to curb the sale of non-ISI certified toys and to ensure implementation of Toys Quality Control Order, 2020, 100 search and seizure operations were carried out in the 2021-22 and 2022-23."

"During the search and seizure operations conducted by BIS, a quantity of 9,565 and 30,229 was seized during the year 2021-22 and 2022-23 (up to January 25, 2023) respectively," he added.

The minister said that safety of toys is under compulsory Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) certification from January 1, 2021 as per the Toys (Quality Control) Order, 2020 issued by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) under Section 16 of the BIS Act, 2016.

Accordingly, it has been compulsory for toys to conform to the corresponding Indian Standards for Safety of Toys and to bear BIS standard mark.

As per this Quality Control Order, no person shall manufacture, import, distribute, sell, hire, lease, store or exhibit for sale any toys without the ISI mark.

Under the BIS Product Certification scheme i.e. Scheme-I of Schedule-II of the BIS (Conformity Assessment) Regulations, 2018, licence is granted to manufacturing units to use the standard mark on the product as per the relevant Indian Standards.

"Accordingly, toy manufacturing units, including foreign manufacturing units exporting toys to India are required to obtain BIS licence for safety of toys. BIS has granted 1,037 licences to domestic units and 30 licences to foreign toy manufacturing units," the minister said.

As part its product certification, BIS also conducts factory and market surveillance under which samples of ISI marked toys are drawn from the factories and market and tested in labs according to the Indian Standard, to ensure that ISI marked toys available to consumer are safe and conforming to prescribed standards.