Government Bans Non-ISI Helmets From June 1, 2021

A move by the Ministry of Road Transport And Highways to reduce deaths and injuries

In a country with road safety as poor as ours, any move to increase the chances of survival in an accident is aces in our book. 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. In case you were wondering, BIS is the Bureau of Indian Standards, the institution authorised to issue ISI marks on helmets and other goods. What this means is that you will no longer be able to buy and use sub-par, poor quality helmets (at least theoretically), which is a good thing.

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. Most of the helmets worn by us folks at the BikeDekho office are ECE and DOT-compliant, but almost none of them feature an ISI sticker, even though they greatly exceed the ISI standards. You might ask, ‘If these helmets exceed ISI standards, then why don’t the manufacturers just get them approved by the BIS?’

Well, homologation of a helmet is a time-consuming and costly process, usually involving the testing of every different shell size for every different model. 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.