Indian standards and special publications now on CD-ROM

BANGALORE: Indian standards and special publications formulated by Bureau of

Indian Standard (BIS) shall now be available on CD-ROMs. The release of Indian

Standards on CD-ROM is a major step taken by BIS, which places it in the

exclusive club of selected European countries and the US, who have used

information technology for providing their standards on the electronic media.

The CD-ROM will contain information of over two lakh pages of 17,000 Indian

Standards and special publications on a few compact discs. The Department of

Consumer Affairs Secretary K. Srinivasan formally inaugurated this project. The

CD-ROMs shall be supplied to customers on an annual lease basis. The lease

charges are being fixed at Rs 2.5 lakh for a full set, which is about 30 per

cent of the cost price of the hard copies of the Indian Standards. The consumers

will have the option of procuring either full set or only the sectional sets

based on technical discipline. During the lease period, the CD-ROMs will be

updated on a bi-monthly basis, free of charge, so as to incorporate amendments

and revisions to the standards and shall be installed at 18 sales counters of

BIS located at various cities in the country.

The individual, segment-specific CD-ROM sets are available on annual lease

charges ranging from Rs 4,500 to Rs 42,000, depending on the discipline. ``All

that the consumer needs to access the information on the CD-ROMs, is a Pentium

PC loaded with the usual Windows software. The product is also available in

stand-alone and multi-user versions,'' said BIS Director-General P.S. Das.