Financial Assistance for using Global Standards in ... - GS1 India

Introduction
The Indian Handicrafts sector plays a significant and important role in the country’s economy. It provides employment
to a vast segment of craft persons in rural and semi urban areas and generates substantial foreign exchange for
the country, while preserving its cultural heritage. Handicrafts have great potential, as they hold the key for sustaining
not only the existing set of millions of artisans spread over length and breadth of the country, but also for the
increasingly large number of new entrants in the crafts activity. Presently, handicrafts contribute substantially to
employment generation and exports. The Handicraft sector has, however, suffered due to its being unorganized,
with the additional constraints of lack of education, low capital, absence of market intelligence and poor exposure
to new technologies like barcoding etc.
Handicrafts activity being a State subject, its development and promotion are the primary responsibility of every
State Government. However, the Central Government is supplementing their efforts by implementing various
development schemes.
The Department of Handicrafts, Minisitry of Textile, Government of India
recognizes the contribution of the Handicrafts Exporters in the growth of
Indian economy, export promotion and employment generation. To make
them compliant with International best practices which use GS1 standards
in barcoding. The Ministry is offering 100% subsidy for the one time
registration fee for using GS1 standards in barcoding.
Barcoding
Barcoding is one of the IT tools used for automatic data
capture. Barcodes are represented through a series of
black bars & white spaces and printed as part of product
packaging or as labels (sticker) or as tags attached to
the product. Barcodes can be used to represent
information related to product identification and other
supplementary information such as batch number,
manufacturing/expiry dates, consigner/consignee etc.
When these barcodes are scanned using a scanner, it
enables instantaneous data capture with 100% accuracy
and at great speeds.
Barcoding using GS1 standards and numbering system
enables universal & unique identification of products/
consignments, across the globe.
GS1 barcodes are accepted as de-facto standards in
Retail worldwide with over 5 billion GS1 barcodes being
scanned each day.