Quality infrastructure encompasses metrology, standardization, testing, quality management, certification, and accreditation essential for achieving developmental goals. It addresses market failures by ensuring transparency and quality in products, particularly in developing countries where this infrastructure is often lacking. Investing in quality infrastructure not only improves consumer trust and product quality but also promotes economic growth and foreign investment.

1. Quality
Infrastructure:
The Key For Reaching Our
Developmental Goals.

2. What does Quality
Infrastructure mean?
• Quality Infrastructure refers to all aspects of metrology,
standardization, testing, quality management, certification
and accreditation that have a bearing on conformity
assessment and quality.
• A quality infrastructure is a highly integrated network of
people, systems and organizations involved in the research,
definition, development and promotion of quality goods,
services and processes.

3. What does it include?
1. Metrology includes the aspects related to measurement
and measuring instruments.
2. Standardization ensures to set rules, principles and general
characteristics related to the products and production
methods.
3. Accreditation is procedure, with which authorized entity
gives the official recognition, that the person or organization
is competent to carry out specific tasks.
4. Testing is the determination of one or more characteristics
of a product according to a specified biological, chemical,
electrical, mechanical or other physical procedure.
5. Inspection is the determination whether products meet the
requirements of a given standard.

4. Why do we need it?
• A justification for the necessity to promote QI is what
economists call market failure. A market economy without
any regulatory framework would not create the necessary
information by itself to provide quality products for the
consumers.
• Markets do not always work efficiently by themselves. In
contrast to the perfect market of an economic textbook, in
reality market consumers and producers are not provided with
full transparency about prices and the quality of products.
Economists call this a market failure. In such a situation
markets malfunction and the low quality drives out high
quality.

5. Its status.
• In most advanced countries (like Germany), the QI has evolved
over a longer period. But, the creation of metrology and
standardization institutes in developing countries (like India) is
much more recent and incomplete.
• Even emerging countries with internationally recognized QI
systems often have old and insufficient facilities (such as
metrology and testing labs), a shortage of qualified staff and a
lack of adequate capacity (such as for accreditation and
conformity assessments) to meet the needs of fast-growing,
modernizing countries. Relatively high costs and low
availability of services economy-wide and poor customer
service orientation hinder their involvement.

6. How it affects our daily lives.
• India solved the problem of adulterated milk in the 1970s by a
campaign of the National Dairy Development Board. It
provided inexpensive machines to measure butterfat content
of the milk at each stage of the distribution chain, from farmer
to wholesaler to vendor, and set up payment schemes under
which prices paid for milk reflect its measured quality. In the
end, consumer stage, brand names were created to give
buyers trust in what they were getting. Quality improved and
consumption rose. Consumers and honest producers
benefited.

7. How it affects our social goals.
• The world is becoming ever more interconnected and
prosperous thanks to the internet. We are socially
interconnected to one another. The more connected we are,
the more we can all benefit from the wisdom and
contributions of people everywhere on earth. And yet four
billion people have no way of getting online, the vast majority
of them in developing countries. The more we invest in
innovation and quality infrastructure, the better off we’ll all
be.

8. How it affects our economical
goals.
• If developing countries (like India) want to attract foreign
investments, they must keep in mind that infrastructure – and
this includes quality infrastructure – is one of the key factors
foreign investors will consider.
• In the case of a national quality infrastructure, they must at
the very least:
1. Ensure access to international standards and technical
regulations.
2. Guarantee reliable measurements and,
3. Set up a system that will allow accreditation of their testing
and certification facilities in such a way that the results of
these bodies will be internationally accepted.
• Thus, if we have quality infrastructure it will have a direct
effect on our economy.

9. The End