Certificate of Origin and India’s Free Trade Agreements: A Guide for Exporters

A certificate of origin is the document that decides whether your buyer pays full duty or the agreed preferential rate. It is also, in our experience of preparing export documentation from Ahmedabad, one of the documents exporters treat as a formality and then lose money on — not because it is difficult, but because a small inconsistency between it and the shipping bill is enough for the concession to be refused at the far end.

This page explains what the certificate does, which type you need, how the DGFT process works now that issuance is electronic, what the rules of origin actually require, where each of India’s trade agreements stands, and — the part most guides leave out — what your importer is obliged to do under CAROTAR 2020 once the certificate reaches them.

Rates, tariff lines and procedures change by notification. Everything here points you to the primary source so you can confirm the current position for your own HS code before you quote a landed cost.

What a certificate of origin actually does

A certificate of origin states where goods were produced. Customs in the importing country use it to decide which tariff treatment applies to the consignment.

That is its whole function, and it splits into two quite different jobs:

• Claiming a concession. Where India has a trade agreement with the destination, a certificate in the agreement’s own format is what lets your buyer claim the reduced or zero duty the agreement provides. Without it, the goods clear at the normal applied rate.
• Simply proving origin. Where there is no agreement, or no concession is being claimed, the certificate still establishes origin for quota, labelling, anti-dumping, statistical and sometimes banking purposes.

The distinction matters because the two are not interchangeable, and this is the single most common error we see.

Preferential and non-preferential — and why the wrong one costs the concession

A non-preferential certificate of origin says only that the goods originated in India. It makes no claim to a reduced duty rate and is the general-purpose document.

A preferential certificate is issued under a specific trade agreement, in that agreement’s prescribed form, by an agency authorised for that agreement. It is the instrument through which the concession is claimed.

A non-preferential certificate cannot be used to claim a preference. If your buyer is expecting a duty concession under an agreement and you send a general certificate of origin, the concession is not available on that consignment — and the shipment has usually already moved by the time anyone notices. Correcting it after the fact ranges from awkward to impossible depending on the destination’s rules.

So the first question on any order into an agreement country is not “do we need a certificate of origin” but “which agreement is the buyer claiming under, and which form does it require”. Ask the buyer. They know their own tariff treatment better than anyone.

Who issues it, and how the DGFT process works now

Certificates of origin in India are issued by agencies authorised for the purpose — the bodies listed in Appendices 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E of the Foreign Trade Policy, which include the Export Inspection Council, various chambers of commerce, commodity boards and export promotion councils. Which agency you go to depends on the agreement and, sometimes, the product.

The process is now electronic. Applications and issuance run exclusively through the DGFT-designated electronic platform at coo.dgft.gov.in, and manual issuance is not permitted. Para 2.90 of the Handbook of Procedures 2023 was amended, and Para 2.62 of the Foreign Trade Policy 2023 amended by gazette notification dated 7 April 2026, to put the digital route on this footing.

Practically, that means:

• Your registration on the platform needs to be current, with a valid digital signature, before an urgent shipment appears. This is not something to discover on the day of the vessel cut-off.
• The data you enter is the data on the certificate. There is no back-office correction between what you type and what customs at the other end reads.
• Because the certificate is issued electronically against what you declare, an inconsistency with your other export documents is visible rather than buried.

Which brings us to the rule that causes the most preventable failures.

The invoice-number rule that quietly defeats claims

The invoice number on the certificate of origin must be identical to the invoice number on the shipping bill.

This sounds trivial. It is the most common reason a preferential claim is questioned.

It goes wrong in ordinary ways: a commercial invoice is revised after the certificate has been applied for and the number changes; the export invoice and the buyer’s proforma carry different series and the wrong one is quoted; a prefix or a leading zero is dropped; a consignment is split and the original invoice number is re-used on both halves.

The fix is procedural, not clever. Freeze the invoice number before the certificate application goes in, and have one person reconcile the certificate, the commercial invoice and the shipping bill against each other before filing — not after. If the invoice genuinely has to change, the certificate has to be reissued to match. The wider document set, and who issues each part of it, is set out on our export and import documents checklist.

Rules of origin, in plain terms

A trade agreement’s concession is only available to goods that genuinely originate in the partner country. Rules of origin are how that is tested, and they exist to stop goods being routed through a member country purely to pick up the tariff benefit.

There are broadly three ways goods qualify, and the applicable agreement decides which:

• Wholly obtained or produced. Goods entirely grown, mined, harvested or produced in India, with nothing imported in them. Straightforward for agricultural and mineral products.
• Substantial transformation. Goods made using imported inputs, where the processing in India is substantial enough to confer origin. This is usually tested by a change in tariff heading, a minimum percentage of domestic value addition, or a specific process requirement — often a combination.
• Product-specific rules. Many agreements set a separate rule for particular tariff lines, which overrides the general rule.

Two things follow that are worth stating plainly. First, the rule is agreement-specific and tariff-line-specific: the same product can qualify under one agreement and fail under another, and a general “35 per cent value addition” answer is not a substitute for reading the schedule for your own HS code. Second, the value-addition calculation rests on your own costing — which means the working needs to exist, in writing, before anyone asks for it. Which, under CAROTAR, they now can.

India’s trade agreements — where each one stands

The position as at late September 2026, for the agreements Indian exporters most often ask about:

Confirm the position for your own destination and tariff line before you quote a landed cost. An agreement being “in force” does not mean every line in it is at zero — most phase concessions in over years, and sensitive lines are often excluded entirely.

The India–New Zealand agreement, as a worked example

The New Zealand agreement is the useful case to walk through, because it enters into force on 20 October 2026 and exporters are preparing for it now.

What is clear and consistently reported: New Zealand eliminates duties on 100 per cent of its tariff lines for Indian goods from day one. Sectors named as gaining include textiles, apparel, leather, footwear, engineering goods, pharmaceuticals and processed food, some of which previously faced duties of up to 10 per cent. The stated target is around NZ$7 billion in bilateral trade by 2030.

On the Indian side of the schedule, published accounts differ between reports, and we are deliberately not repeating a figure here. What is consistent is that dairy and several agricultural products were kept outside India’s concessions. If you are importing from New Zealand, read the tariff treatment of your own HS code in the agreement schedule rather than relying on a headline percentage — including ours.

The operational point that matters most right now: as at the end of September 2026, no certificate-of-origin or rules-of-origin operating procedure specific to the New Zealand agreement has been published. Nobody can tell you the agreement-specific form or issuing arrangement yet, because it does not exist publicly.

What to do in the meantime, if you have New Zealand orders landing after 20 October:

1. Identify your HS code and find its line in the agreement’s tariff schedule. Confirm whether it is duty-free from day one or phased.
2. Read the product-specific origin rule for that line and check, on paper, that your product meets it. Do the value-addition working now.
3. Keep your DGFT platform registration and digital signature current.
4. Watch the DGFT platform and CBIC for the agreement-specific procedure and form, and be ready to apply under it rather than under a general certificate.
5. Talk to your buyer about which document their customs broker expects. They will be told before you are.

We will update this page when the procedure is notified.

CAROTAR 2020 — what your importer is now obliged to do

This is the half of the subject most exporter guides omit, and it is the half that generates the awkward emails.

The Customs (Administration of Rules of Origin under Trade Agreements) Rules, 2020 — CAROTAR — came into force on 21 September 2020 under Section 28DA of the Customs Act. They shift a real burden onto the importer claiming a preference, and that burden lands back on you as the supplier of the underlying information.

Under these rules the importer must:

• Declare in the bill of entry that the goods qualify as originating, cite the relevant tariff notification, hold a certificate covering each item claimed, and enter its details.
• Possess the information set out in Form I — which requires the importer to hold information about how the origin criteria are met, including the production process undertaken in the country of origin. Not merely to hold the certificate, but to be able to explain the basis for it.
• Retain origin-related records for five years from the date of filing the bill of entry.
• Respond within ten working days to a request for information (Rule 5(2)).

Where a verification request goes to the exporting country’s authority, the rules allow sixty days where the agreement itself sets no timeline (Rule 6(3)), and the officer concludes within forty-five days of receiving the information (Rule 6(6)).

And — the part worth reading twice — preference can be denied without any verification at all where the certificate is incomplete, has been altered, has expired, or covers items that are not eligible (Rule 3(2)). A certificate with a correction pen mark on it is a denied claim.

The consequence for an Indian exporter is straightforward: your buyer may come back asking how your product meets the origin criterion, and they may come back years later. Keep the costing and the process description that support your origin claim, filed against the shipment, for at least as long as your buyer has to keep theirs. An exporter who can answer that question in a day keeps the customer. One who cannot has handed their buyer a duty bill.

How this sits with the rest of your export paperwork

The certificate of origin is one document in a set, and it only works if the set agrees with itself. The export and import documents checklist covers what travels with a shipment and who issues each item. Customs clearance sets out what a broker files and what remains your declaration, and CHA and Customs Broker services explains the licence behind that filing. On the incentive side, RoDTEP is the other export benefit that turns on a single declaration made at filing time rather than afterwards. For the freight itself, see ocean freight and air freight.

Where Scapex fits

To be precise about this: Scapex does not issue certificates of origin. An authorised agency issues them. What we do, as a freight forwarder and customs broker based in Ahmedabad, is prepare and align the documentation around them — so the invoice number on the certificate matches the shipping bill, the origin declaration is consistent with what is actually being filed, the certificate is applied for in time for the vessel, and the paperwork your buyer’s customs broker receives does not generate questions.

That is a documentation discipline rather than a product, and it is most of the difference between a concession claimed and a concession lost.

If you are exporting from Gujarat and want your certificate of origin, invoice and shipping bill reconciled before filing rather than after, get in touch.

Where to check the official position

• DGFT certificate of origin platform — applications, issuance and the authorised agencies.
• DGFT — the Foreign Trade Policy and Handbook of Procedures, including Appendices 2B, 2C, 2D and 2E.
• CBIC — CAROTAR 2020, Section 28DA and the tariff notifications giving effect to each agreement.
• Department of Commerce — the agreement texts, their annexes and their origin rules.