On 28 April, the Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) signed a cooperation agreement with ETSI, strengthening relations after the establishment of a first Letter of Intent to cooperate with ETSI in November 2014. Collaboration between the two standards organizations now happens at the level of the Global Standards Collaboration (GSC) initiative where TSDSI is a full member. GSC fosters cooperation among standards organizations from different regions of the world to facilitate the exchange of information on standards development, build synergies and reduce duplication of work.

This enhanced relationship is all the more important as “Make in India” and “Digital India” are Indian policies, where reinforced collaboration is needed to enable and ensure joint efforts between EU and India market players. TSDSI has also signed agreements with 3GPP and oneM2M partnership projects, of which ETSI is a founding member.

With a leadership and Technical Organization in place, TSDSI is fully operational and has developed its own IPR policy, making sure that the respective IPR Policies of TSDSI and ETSI were aligned. The collaboration between the two standards bodies will facilitate exchange and work on identified common areas such as M2M and IoT, energy efficiency, mobile terminal safety, to name a few. As TSDSI wished to use ETSI standards, recognized as high quality and globally implemented standards, the cooperation agreement grants TSDSI the right to adopt ETSI standards.

ETSI is supported in India by the Seconded European Standardization Expert for India (SESEI) project. This project is established by the European Standards Organizations CEN, CENELEC and ETSI, the European Commission and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). A seconded standardization expert, Mr. Dinesh Chand Sharma, has been appointed in India to increase the visibility of European standardization and to promote EU/EFTA-India cooperation on standards and related policies and legislations.