A second anti-dumping recommendation in under a fortnight brings the number of Bangladeshi export lines facing Indian duties to five, and Dhaka’s exporters are asking whether a trade relationship worth billions is being dismantled one product at a time
NEW DELHI / DHAKA, 6 October 2026 – India’s trade remedy authority has recommended anti-dumping duties of up to 218 dollars a tonne on polyethylene terephthalate film imported from Bangladesh, a determination reported across South Asian business media over the past 48 hours and arriving less than two weeks after New Delhi imposed duties of up to 445 dollars a tonne on Bangladeshi jute goods.
The Directorate General of Trade Remedies issued its PET film recommendation on 29 September. It becomes binding only on notification by India’s Ministry of Finance, which in the jute case followed within days. If notified, the duties would run for five years.
Taken together the two measures bring to five the number of Bangladeshi export products now subject to Indian anti-dumping action, and they have provoked a response in Dhaka that has moved beyond commercial complaint into something closer to a question about the direction of the relationship.
The PET film determination
The DGTR investigation covered PET film imports from Bangladesh, China and Thailand. The dumping investigation period ran from April 2024 to March 2025, with injury assessment extending back to 2021-22.
The recommended rates differentiate sharply between cooperating and non-cooperating exporters. AKIJ Biax Films Ltd, part of the AkijBashir Group and the sole Bangladeshi producer to participate fully in the investigation, would face a duty of 58 dollars a tonne. All other Bangladeshi exporters would face 218 dollars a tonne. Chinese producers face a range of 54 to 361 dollars a tonne and Thai exporters 198 to 366 dollars a tonne.
The authority concluded that “dumped imports from the three countries undercut Indian producers’ prices and caused them material injury.”
The trade volumes involved make the finding notable. Bangladesh shipped 2,763 tonnes of PET film to India in fiscal 2024-25, roughly 3.4 per cent of India’s total PET film imports. China supplied 26,086 tonnes and Thailand 12,870 tonnes over the same period. Bangladesh is, in other words, the smallest of the three origins by a wide margin, supplying a volume that would be a rounding error in most of India’s industrial import categories.
What drew the authority’s attention was the trajectory rather than the level. Bangladeshi shipments had risen from 12 tonnes in 2021-22 to 2,763 tonnes in 2024-25, an increase of more than two hundredfold from a negligible base. Rapid growth from a small base is a recognised trigger for trade-defence attention everywhere, and it is the pattern that most often produces measures against suppliers whose absolute volumes remain modest.
The DGTR also addressed the downstream consequence, concluding that the duty would add roughly five paise, or about 0.2 per cent, to the price of a packet of snacks. PET film is used extensively in flexible packaging for food, pharmaceuticals and industrial applications, and the finding was framed as evidence that the measure would not meaningfully burden Indian consumers.
The jute measure that preceded it
India’s finance ministry notified anti-dumping duties on Bangladeshi jute products on 24 September, at rates ranging from 59 to 445 dollars a tonne. The affected products are jute yarn and twine, jute sacking bags and hessian fabric.
The structure of the measure is unusually granular. Asha Jute Industries received the lowest rate at 59 dollars a tonne. Seventeen Bangladeshi firms face 120 dollars a tonne on sacking bags. Six producers, including AM Jute Industries and Bonanza Jute Composite, were exempted entirely, and two further producers received zero rates on specific products. Producers not named in the notification face 445 dollars a tonne on yarn and twine, a residual rate that functions as a prohibition for anyone outside the listed group.
Bangladesh’s jute exports to India had already fallen 18 per cent year on year to 117,000 tonnes in fiscal 2024-25, before the new duties. Overall Bangladeshi jute and jute goods exports to all destinations recovered to 884 million dollars in fiscal 2026 from 820 million the year before.
India has also moved to open an anti-subsidy investigation into jute goods, which would layer countervailing duties on top of the anti-dumping measures already notified.
The response from Dhaka
Bangladeshi industry has not accepted the findings quietly.
Tapash Pramanik, chairman of the Bangladesh Jute Spinners Association, described the Indian measures as “one-sided” and “coercive,” and disputed the subsidy premise directly, noting that government support to the sector has “reduced significantly over the years” to a current level of 3 to 5 per cent. The argument Bangladeshi producers make is that their cost advantage in jute is structural rather than policy-created: Bangladesh grows the raw fibre, processes it domestically and has a labour cost base substantially below India’s.
That argument has limited traction in an anti-dumping proceeding, which compares export price to normal value rather than assessing whether a cost advantage is legitimate. It has more force in the anti-subsidy case now opening, where the existence and level of government support is the central question.
Among PET film exporters the reaction has been more resigned. AKIJ Biax, having cooperated and secured a rate roughly a quarter of the residual, is in a materially better position than its competitors, which illustrates a lesson that exporters in developing economies often learn expensively: participation in these proceedings is costly, requiring legal representation and extensive data disclosure, and non-participation is almost always costlier.
Bangladeshi trade officials have pointed to the cumulative pattern. Five products now carry Indian anti-dumping measures. Each individual case is defensible on its own terms under WTO rules. The aggregate effect is a steadily narrowing set of products Bangladesh can sell into its largest neighbour.
The structural picture
The India-Bangladesh trade relationship is among the most asymmetric in Asia. India exports several times more to Bangladesh than it imports, and the imbalance has been a source of friction for years. Bangladeshi policymakers have periodically raised it in bilateral forums; Indian officials have pointed to Bangladesh’s own tariff structure and to non-tariff barriers on the Bangladeshi side.
Against that backdrop, anti-dumping measures on small-volume Bangladeshi exports carry a political weight disproportionate to their economic effect. The jute and PET film duties together affect a few hundred million dollars of trade at most. The signal they send concerns market access for a developing economy whose export base is narrow and whose diversification efforts have been focused precisely on products like PET film.
Bangladesh’s graduation from least developed country status compounds the problem. LDC status has underpinned preferential access to several markets, and its loss removes tariff advantages at the same moment that trade-defence measures are multiplying. The combination has concentrated minds in Dhaka on the fragility of an export profile still dominated by ready-made garments.
There is also a regional dimension. India has been the most active user of trade-defence instruments in the developing world for two decades, maintaining a large caseload against China in particular. Measures against Bangladesh sit within that broader pattern rather than outside it, and Indian officials would argue that applying the same standards to all origins is precisely what the rules require.
Economic impact
For Indian producers of PET film and jute goods, the measures provide relief in markets where they have argued that imports were setting prices below sustainable levels. India’s PET film industry has substantial domestic capacity and has complained for several years about import competition from multiple origins simultaneously. The three-country scope of the PET film case reflects that, and the Bangladeshi component is the smallest part of the remedy.
For Indian downstream users, the cost is the one the DGTR quantified: a marginal increase in packaging costs passed through to food, pharmaceutical and industrial products. The authority’s five paise figure is a point estimate for one product category and should not be read as the full downstream effect across all applications, but the order of magnitude is plausible.
For Bangladeshi exporters the effect is binary rather than marginal. A duty of 218 dollars a tonne on a commodity film product priced in the low thousands of dollars a tonne removes the margin on which the trade operated. Exporters other than AKIJ Biax will largely exit the Indian market rather than absorb it. The jute residual rate of 445 dollars a tonne has the same effect for unlisted producers.
For the broader regional economy, the measures accelerate a trend toward trade fragmentation in South Asia at a time when intra-regional trade remains strikingly low as a share of each country’s total. South Asia has among the lowest levels of intra-regional trade of any region in the world, and the direction of policy in the past two years has not been toward reversing that.
What it means for importers and supply chains
Several practical implications follow for companies sourcing from or selling into the region.
Buyers of flexible packaging materials in India should expect supply to consolidate toward domestic producers and toward the specific foreign exporters that secured low individual rates. Where a cooperating exporter holds a meaningful rate advantage over its own compatriots, as AKIJ Biax now does, that exporter becomes the de facto channel for the entire origin, which concentrates supply risk in a single counterparty.
Exporters in developing economies building new product lines into India should treat trade-defence exposure as a design parameter rather than a downstream risk. The pattern in both the jute and PET film cases is that rapid growth from a small base attracts a complaint within two to three years. Growth strategies that assume uninterrupted access for the duration of a capacity investment are underwriting a risk they have not priced.
The cooperation calculus deserves explicit attention at board level. The difference between 58 and 218 dollars a tonne in this case, and between zero and 445 dollars a tonne in the jute case, is the difference between a business and no business. The legal cost of full participation in a DGTR proceeding is a fraction of that gap for any exporter with meaningful volume.
Multinational packaging and consumer goods companies with South Asian footprints should review origin flexibility across their film sourcing. The three-origin scope of the PET film case means that China, Thailand and Bangladesh are simultaneously affected, which removes the most obvious substitutions and leaves domestic Indian supply, imports from unaffected origins such as Korea or the Gulf, or absorption of the duty.
Finally, the anti-subsidy case now opening on jute signals that countervailing duties may follow anti-dumping measures as a second layer on the same products. Exporters who treated the September notification as the end of the matter should be preparing for a parallel proceeding with a different evidentiary focus, in which government support programmes rather than pricing behaviour will be the subject.
What happens next
The PET film recommendation awaits finance ministry notification. On the precedent of the jute case, that step has been following the DGTR recommendation within days rather than months.
The jute anti-subsidy investigation will run on its own timetable, and Bangladeshi producers will have to decide whether to participate having seen what non-participation cost in the anti-dumping phase.
Bangladeshi officials have signalled an intention to raise the cumulative pattern bilaterally. Whether that produces anything depends on whether New Delhi regards five anti-dumping measures as five independent technical determinations or as a trade policy stance. The institutional answer is that they are the former. The answer Dhaka’s exporters are working from is that in aggregate they amount to the latter.
How the rates were built
The arithmetic behind the numbers is worth setting out, because it explains most of what exporters find bewildering about these proceedings.
An anti-dumping margin is the difference between normal value, which is ordinarily the price of the like product in the exporter’s home market, and the export price to the investigating country, expressed as a proportion of the export price. Where domestic sales are insufficient or not in the ordinary course of trade, the authority constructs normal value from cost of production plus reasonable amounts for selling costs and profit.
Exporters that participate supply their own cost and sales data, which is then verified. The resulting margin is specific to that firm. Exporters that do not participate are assessed on facts available, which in practice means the authority uses the information in the complaint, supplemented by whatever import statistics exist. Complainants have no incentive to be conservative in the data they submit, and authorities have no obligation to be generous to firms that declined to engage.
That is how a single Bangladeshi producer ends up at 58 dollars a tonne while its neighbours face 218. The gap is not a judgement about relative pricing behaviour. It is almost entirely a function of who filed questionnaire responses.
The jute case shows the same structure in sharper relief. Six producers were exempted outright, two received zero rates on specific products, seventeen face 120 dollars a tonne on sacking bags, and everyone else faces 445 dollars a tonne on yarn and twine. A firm that is commercially indistinguishable from an exempted competitor can find itself facing a prohibitive rate solely because it did not appear.
Indian procedure, like most, permits new exporters to request individual review after the fact, but the review takes months and the duty applies throughout. For a commodity product with thin margins, months at a prohibitive rate ends the trade relationship regardless of how the review concludes.
The injury question
The other half of an anti-dumping case, and the half that receives less attention from exporters, is injury.
An authority must find that the domestic industry suffered material injury and that dumped imports caused it. The indicators examined typically include production, capacity utilisation, sales volume, market share, profits, return on investment, cash flow, inventories, employment, wages, growth and ability to raise capital. Price undercutting, price depression and price suppression are examined separately.
In the PET film case the authority found undercutting across all three origins and attributed material injury to the cumulated effect. Cumulation is the mechanism that matters most for Bangladesh here. Where imports from several countries are investigated together and each exceeds a negligibility threshold, the authority may assess their effects cumulatively rather than country by country. Bangladesh at 3.4 per cent of imports would struggle to be shown as an independent cause of injury to the Indian industry. Cumulated with China at 26,086 tonnes and Thailand at 12,870 tonnes, it does not have to be.
Negligibility thresholds exist precisely to protect small suppliers from this outcome, and WTO rules provide that imports from a country accounting for less than 3 per cent of total imports are ordinarily excluded unless such countries collectively account for more than 7 per cent. Bangladesh’s 3.4 per cent share sits just above the individual threshold. A slightly slower growth trajectory would have placed it below.
That is a thin margin on which to lose a market, and it illustrates why export growth management, not merely export growth, belongs in the commercial planning of firms building into large neighbouring economies.
The wider regional context
Both measures land in a bilateral relationship that has been under strain on several fronts, and separating the technical from the political is harder than either government’s public position suggests.
Bangladesh’s export base remains heavily concentrated in ready-made garments, which account for the overwhelming majority of foreign exchange earnings. Successive governments have identified diversification as the central economic policy objective, and jute, jute goods, PET film, plastics and light engineering have been among the designated priority sectors. India, as the nearest large market, is the natural first destination for a diversifying exporter, and it is where the growth has shown up.
That makes the pattern of Indian measures consequential out of proportion to the trade volumes involved. The products now carrying duties are precisely the products Bangladesh identified as its path away from garment dependence.
Indian officials would respond, with justification, that the DGTR applies the same statutory tests to Bangladeshi imports as to any other origin, that India maintains a far larger caseload against China than against Bangladesh, and that the authority cannot decline to find dumping because the exporting country is a developing neighbour with diversification objectives. The anti-dumping agreement contains a provision requiring special regard to the situation of developing country members before applying duties, but its operational content has never been clearly established in practice.
The regional trade picture compounds the difficulty. Intra-regional trade in South Asia sits far below the levels seen in East Asia, Europe or North America, and the gap has been attributed variously to tariff structures, non-tariff barriers, transport and customs friction, and political relations. Trade-defence measures are a comparatively small contributor to that total, but they are a visible one, and they fall on exactly the new product lines that would otherwise deepen regional integration.
Reaction
Beyond the jute spinners’ association, response in Dhaka has come from several directions in the days since the PET film recommendation surfaced.
Exporters in the plastics and packaging sector have pointed out that the Indian measure arrives as Bangladeshi producers are commissioning capacity built on the assumption of regional demand, and that the economics of those investments assumed access to the Indian market rather than to more distant destinations where freight costs erode the cost advantage.
Trade policy commentators in Bangladesh have been making a longer-horizon argument: that the lesson of the past two years is not that India is hostile but that Bangladesh has been slow to build the institutional capacity to defend its exporters in foreign proceedings. Countries with established trade-remedy defence practices treat an initiation as a legal problem with a known response. Exporters without that support treat it as a shock and often do not respond at all, which produces exactly the residual rates now applying across both cases.
Indian industry bodies have welcomed both measures in conventional terms, citing idle capacity and price pressure. The Indian PET film industry’s complaint has been directed primarily at Chinese volumes, which are roughly ten times the Bangladeshi figure, and the Bangladeshi duty is in that sense a byproduct of a case built against a larger supplier.