Importing from China to India

Most guides for this route open with duty. On the evidence of the regulator's own page, the more urgent question for a 3C importer is registration.

What the schedule is. BIS operates a Scheme II — a registration scheme — and publishes the list of electronics and IT goods that fall under compulsory registration, notified by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the 2021 Order that superseded the 2012 one. Each entry pairs a product category with a named Indian Standard.

Why it matters so much to this particular audience. Look at what is on it: power banks, power adaptors, portable cells and batteries, mobile phones, smart watches, keyboards, wireless headphones and earphones, Bluetooth and smart speakers, webcams, cameras, USB external storage, standalone power supplies. That is not a corner of the consumer-electronics accessory market. It is most of it.

And the categories are written narrowly, which cuts both ways. Some entries carry thresholds — a storage capacity, an output voltage, a power rating, a screen size. So "is my product on the list?" is a question about the exact category wording and your exact specification, not about the general kind of thing you sell.

The practical instruction is simple and it is not a shortcut: find your product category in the current schedule, read the wording, and note which Indian Standard it points at. Do that before you quote a landed cost, because the answer changes what the project is.

The overwhelming majority of those categories are listed against IS/IEC 62368 Part 1: 2023, the Indian adoption of the international safety standard for audio/video, information and communication technology equipment. That is genuinely good news, because it means the engineering work behind an Indian registration is largely the same body of work as for other markets that use the same international standard — and this site has a page explaining what that standard actually does and why it replaced its predecessors.

Batteries are the notable exception in this catalogue. Sealed secondary cells and batteries for portable applications are listed against IS 16046, which is a different standard with a different test programme. So a product containing a cell may sit against two standards at once, and the cell's own compliance is not the finished product's.

A migration has been running. The same BIS page records a notification of 4 November 2025 covering migration to IS/IEC 62368 Part 1: 2023 from earlier standards. A test report against a superseded standard is a document about a superseded standard — so the edition matters, and "we have a 62368 report" is worth one more question than most buyers ask.

This page does not say what testing your product needs. That is decided by the category, the standard edition and the specification, and it is a laboratory's answer rather than a guide's. What this page can tell you is which two things to establish first: the category, and the standard it is listed against.

Anything printed about this list is a photograph, and BIS's own page proves it. Within the last twelve months that page carries a migration notification of 4 November 2025; extension notifications of 22 January 2026 and 26 July 2026; a general amendment of 10 March 2026; a further amendment of 5 May 2026 adding standalone hard disk drives; and a rescinding order of 9 June 2026 in an adjacent schedule.

Six or more instruments in a year is not an unusual burst; it is the normal cadence. So a category list in a guide — including the one in this article's opening — is dated evidence rather than a standing answer, and it is offered here with the date it was read for exactly that reason.

What that means for planning. Two products that are identical to you may be on different sides of the schedule, and a product that was outside it when you designed the range may be inside it when you ship. Re-check at three moments: when you choose the product, before you commit to tooling or a first production run, and before each shipment in a new financial year.

And read the extension notifications, not just the additions. Implementation dates for newly added categories have been extended more than once on that page — which means both that a deadline may be later than you feared, and that a date you relied on may have been superseded.

You, or an Indian company you control, are the importer of record, and the accuracy of the declaration belongs to that party.

Your commodity code sets the duty and much of the regulation. No duty or tax rates appear on this page — they are per code, they are revised in the annual budget cycle, and a figure here would be trusted long after it stopped being true.

And note the contrast with the other regulated destination in this cluster. In Saudi Arabia the process runs through a platform the importer initiates. In India the scheme is a registration against a product and a standard. They are different shapes, so an arrangement that worked for one market is not a template for the other — and "our supplier handles certification" needs a different answer in each.

This page makes no claim about who must hold an Indian registration or how a foreign manufacturer applies — that was not verifiable against BIS's own pages today, and it is the single most consequential detail to get right. Establish it with BIS or a recognised body before you plan around it, and get the answer in writing.

Sequence it properly. Registration is a production-timeline item, not a shipping-timeline item. The version of this project that goes badly is the one where the goods exist first.