The State Duma may pass a bill by the end of the year that would allow the government to borrow European and other foreign industrial standards in an effort to encourage companies to use new technologies, Kremlin aide Arkady Dvorkovich said Tuesday.
“We want the bill to be passed this year,” Dvorkovich said.
Many manufacturers, construction businesses and companies in other economic sectors are still bound by outdated standards inherited from the Soviet Union, which permit production of low quality goods, poor workplace safety or insist on now-inadequate technology.
Overly permissive road safety standards are often faulted for the high mortality rate in traffic accidents. President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have repeatedly complained that antiquated requirements make road construction more expensive than in the West. And the construction of modern high-rise buildings in Moscow falls under the rules dating back to 1970, Duma Deputy Speaker Yury Volkov said last week.
A federal law requires the Duma and the government to introduce 400 new standards by July 1 next year, but only 10 have been updated so far, prompting officials, including Medvedev, to seek an alternative solution. Medvedev said last week that foreign standards should just be translated and followed.
The bill that is scheduled to go to the Duma this week or next week would allow the Cabinet to enforce standards borrowed from the European Union or Kazakhstan where they are based on their European counterparts, Dvorkovich said. He didn’t say who would submit the bill.
The State Duma will be able to approve about 30 percent of the required new standards by the July deadline, said Yevgeny Fyodorov, chairman of the Duma’s Economic Policy and Entrepreneurship Committee.
“The outdated Soviet standards don’t make it possible for new technology to take shape,” he said by phone. “They preserve industrial backwardness. We need a breakthrough.”
The borrowed standards could cover the machine-building and light industries, he said.
Requiring producers to meet higher standards would make Russian goods more competitive internationally, he said.
In recent years, the Duma passed new standards for dairy products, tobacco and juices. The deadly fire in a Perm nightclub last week, however, raised questions about enforcement. An improved fire safety standard went into effect last year, but it failed to prevent the fire that killed at least 118 people, largely because the place didn’t have an emergency exit.
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