I noted in the above post that global IT leader India was not on the new international EPEAT purchasing registry. EPEAT Communications Director Sarah O'Brien was kind enough to clarify this for me; here are excerpts from her email.

"Why these countries? Our multi-stakeholder advisory board wanted to make sure that we rolled out the international expansion at a measured pace, in order to be able to support the system and learn from a gradual process, rather than opening the floodgates to all countries at once. The Board of Advisors initially decided to cover the countries that both have marketing agreements with ENERGY STAR and reflect significant participation in – and demand for – EPEAT."

"Why not India? Brazil, Mexico and China have all demonstrated significant interest and uptake among purchasers, manufacturers and governmental agencies for EPEAT– so we made sure to develop the registry capacity n those countries. We have had a few individual inquiries from India but have not yet been made aware of significant purchaser usage or manufacturer interest in India yet, so that country was not included in this first round."

"Numbers of products/companies by country: Purchaser demand is key – there are literally hundreds of products registered In EPEAT for all listed countries that are not yet activated. Because manufacturers take EPEAT registration extremely seriously, and devote significant resources to maintaining quality control, supply chain conformance procedures and so forth to support EPEAT registrations, they may well be waiting to activate product listings until they see demand. So the best way to expand the EPEAT registrations anywhere is to ask for them!"

The bottom line is that EPEAT registration follows EPEAT demand. It is responsibility of public and private enterprises in India (or any country) to get the ball rolling by specifying EPEAT products in upcoming purchases. Recent survey results about Green IT purchasing in India suggests this may happen in the next twelve months.