Import and export compliance

Products notified under the Compulsory Registration Scheme or Quality Control Orders, including many electronics, IT products and industrial goods. They can’t be imported without a valid BIS licence or registration.

Equipment Type Approval from the Wireless Planning and Coordination wing of the Department of Telecommunications. Many devices with radio functions, like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, need it.

For many categories, yes. Importers of electrical and electronic equipment, batteries and plastic packaging generally count as producers and must register for Extended Producer Responsibility.

India’s list of Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies. Exporting listed items needs an authorisation, usually from DGFT.

Three things, mostly: the HS code and what the tariff says about the goods, the import policy position — free, restricted or otherwise — and the certifications, registrations or licences the product needs. Labelling and sector rules sit in the same pass, from Legal Metrology declarations to a CDSCO licence for medical devices. The point of doing this early is that a missing approval is cheap to fix before shipping and expensive after — the difference between a short wait for a certificate and a container gathering storage at the port.

Where the goods live in one family, yes — a single BIS registration can list a range of models, and one EPR registration can cover a category. The paperwork still names each model or category, so a genuinely new product starts its own file. The desk groups whatever can be grouped and says plainly where a fresh approval cannot be avoided, with the reasons written down so the same question does not come back next quarter.

Yes. Where the tariff or policy places a product behind a licence, the desk prepares the application for the import licence India issues through DGFT and follows it until it is granted. The right moment to start is your buying cycle, not the week of sailing — the authorisation has to exist before the goods land, and the shipment is then filed under it.

Some components are notified in their own right — electronics and IT parts especially — while others ride on the finished product’s approval. The test is the notified list read against the exact item you are importing, not the category it appears to belong to. The desk checks the model against the notified list before filing, because discovering a certification gap at the port turns a purchase into a negotiation with the clock running.

Usually the approval attaches to the model, so variants with different radio parts or model numbers are checked individually. Where several models share the same approved module and specifications, one approval can often cover the range. The desk reads the datasheets against the existing approval before shipping and flags any model that needs its own application, so the certification queue runs alongside production rather than behind it.

Often, yes. EPR registration runs category by category — electrical and electronic equipment, batteries, plastic packaging — and an importer whose goods arrive in plastic packaging carries obligations on that packaging too. The desk maps which categories your shipments touch and lines up the registrations before the first container moves, rather than after a notice arrives from the pollution control authorities.