Q. What up with new helmet norm? Can't we buy helmets certified with ece, sharp and dot? Do we have to stick with substandard ISI mark?

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has passed a quality-control order which will ban the manufacturing and sale of non-BIS helmets from June 1, 2021. BIS is the Bureau of Indian Standards, the institution authorised to issue ISI marks on helmets and other goods. Unfortunately, there are a couple of downsides here. Firstly, the ISI standards aren’t all that high anyway, and secondly, the government refuses to acknowledge the existence of superior international helmet standards such as ECE and DOT, which far surpass ISI. Even if these helmets exceed ISI standards, it makes very little sense for a global manufacturer to go through all that trouble to homologate its helmets for just one country where it’s only going to sell a few hundred of its helmets. Instead, homologating helmets for the two much more widely accepted ECE and DOT standards allows the manufacturer to sell its helmets in dozens of countries worldwide for much less headache. We hope this new ruling will not limit the availability of genuine world-class helmets and force us all to buy only ISI-approved helmets.