New Delhi opens a four-day run of anti-dumping hearings aimed largely at Chinese goods this week, capping a summer in which India’s trade-remedy machinery has moved at its fastest pace in years.
NEW DELHI, August 4, 2026 – India’s trade-remedy authority stepped into one of the busiest weeks on its calendar on Monday, convening an oral hearing on insoluble sulphur imports from China and Japan at 3:00 PM local time, the opening session in a four-day series of hearings that will also take up Chinese printed circuit board tools on Tuesday, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) films from five countries on Wednesday, and Chinese wallpapers on Thursday. The hearing schedule, published on the website of the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR), lands one week after a burst of activity in late July that included the initiation of two new anti-dumping investigations on July 31, one covering certain antioxidants from China, South Korea and Singapore and another covering thermal paper from the United States, China and South Korea, as well as the July 28 notification of a definitive five-year anti-dumping duty on low-ash metallurgical coke from six countries, China among them.
Taken together, the docket confirms what trade lawyers in New Delhi have been saying for months: India is now running one of the most aggressive trade-remedy programs in the world, and the overwhelming majority of its firepower is pointed at Beijing. The escalation is unfolding against a record bilateral trade deficit with China that crossed 100 billion dollars for the first time in the 2025-26 fiscal year, and it carries consequences well beyond the two countries, reaching exporters in Vietnam, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Bangladesh, the European Union and the United States, all of which now find their goods swept into Indian investigations alongside Chinese merchandise.
Four Hearings in Four Days
The week’s schedule is unusually dense even by the DGTR’s recent standards. According to hearing notices posted by the directorate, Monday’s session concerns imports of insoluble sulphur, a vulcanizing agent essential to tyre manufacturing, originating in or exported from China and Japan. On Tuesday, August 5, the authority will hear argument in its investigation of printed circuit board tools from China, an input category that sits at the heart of India’s fast-growing electronics assembly sector. On Wednesday, August 6, at 3:30 PM, stakeholders will present their positions on PET films from Bangladesh, China, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States. And on Thursday, August 7, also at 3:30 PM, the directorate will hear the case on wallpapers from China.
Oral hearings are one of the final procedural milestones before the DGTR issues findings. Under India’s trade-remedy rules, the directorate investigates and recommends duties, while the Ministry of Finance takes the final decision on whether to impose them. In practice, hearings of this kind are where importers, user industries and foreign exporters make their last sustained push to narrow product definitions, win exclusions or contest injury findings before the recommendation stage.
The PET film case illustrates why the hearings matter commercially. India is one of the world’s largest markets for packaging films, and the investigation names suppliers across five economies, including American producers, a relatively rare instance of United States exporters facing Indian anti-dumping exposure. Trade publication ICIS reported earlier this year that India was weighing provisional anti-dumping duties on PET films from Bangladesh, China and Thailand while the investigation proceeded, a signal that the directorate found at least a preliminary basis for action. For converters and flexible-packaging buyers in India, the outcome will determine whether a duty wall goes up around one of their core raw materials.
The wallpaper case, by contrast, is small in dollar terms but emblematic of the breadth of the current wave. From decor paper and soda-lime glass vials to electric tractors and semi-finished ophthalmic lenses, the DGTR’s active caseload now stretches across nearly every category in which Chinese factories hold global scale. The directorate’s own “News and Announcements” board currently flags fresh proceedings on antioxidants, thermal paper, para nonylphenol from Russia and Taiwan, cold-rolled stainless steel flat products from China, Indonesia and Vietnam, solar encapsulants from China and from South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, and cold-rolled grain oriented electrical steel from China, Japan, Korea and Russia.
A Docket Built Through the Summer
The hearings cap a sequence of concrete measures notified over the past several weeks. The most significant is the definitive anti-dumping duty on low-ash metallurgical coke, a critical blast-furnace input for steelmakers. According to a report by KNN India, the Finance Ministry’s notification, issued July 28, imposes duties of 42.95 to 128.83 dollars per tonne on metallurgical coke containing less than 18 percent ash imported from Australia, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Japan and Russia. The measure runs for five years from the date of the provisional duty, which was imposed on December 31, 2025, following the DGTR’s preliminary findings. The directorate’s final findings, dated April 28, 2026, concluded that coke from the six countries was exported to India at dumped prices and caused material injury to domestic producers, KNN India reported.
The notification carves out several exemptions: ultra-low phosphorous metallurgical coke imported for ferro-alloy manufacturing, semi-coke and soft coke, and coke of 20 to 40 millimetre size imported by actual users for small blast furnaces of up to 130 cubic metres used in pig iron production, subject to undertakings and pollution-authority certification of furnace capacity. The carve-outs reflect an attempt to shield foundries and ferro-alloy makers, many of them small and medium enterprises, from a duty designed primarily to protect merchant coke producers.
Electrical steel tells a similar story of recommendation followed by imposition, and now a second front. In September 2025, the DGTR recommended five-year anti-dumping duties on cold-rolled non-oriented electrical steel from China, with rates of 223.82 dollars per tonne on certain Chinese firms and 414.92 dollars per tonne on others, according to Business Standard. The Finance Ministry converted that recommendation into duties in late December 2025, alongside a separate duty on the Chinese refrigerant gas R-134a, news agency PTI reported. Then, on June 22, 2026, the directorate opened a fresh investigation into the other major grade of electrical steel, cold-rolled grain oriented (CRGO) steel and amorphous metal, from China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, following a complaint by JSW JFE Electrical Steel Nashik Pvt. Ltd., which became India’s only CRGO producer after acquiring Thyssenkrupp’s Nashik facility in January 2025.
Nor is the wave confined to China. On November 13, 2025, India imposed five-year anti-dumping duties on hot-rolled flat steel products from Vietnam, covering alloy and non-alloy steel up to 25 millimetres thick and up to 2,100 millimetres wide. All Vietnamese producers face a fixed duty of 121.55 dollars per tonne except Hoa Phat Dung Quat Steel Joint Stock Company, which was found not to be dumping and exempted, according to reporting by Business Standard and a case summary published on Lexology. The measure was widely read as an effort to close a rerouting channel, since Vietnamese mills roll large volumes of Chinese-origin slab and billet.
The chemicals sector has seen equally rapid movement. A Finance Ministry notification dated June 19, 2026 imposed five-year anti-dumping duties on sulphenamide accelerators, chemicals used in rubber and tyre manufacturing, imported from China, the European Union and the United States, at rates ranging from 75 to 1,748 dollars per tonne, Business Standard reported. Days later, on June 24, the DGTR issued final findings in its investigation of the rubber antidegradant PX-13 from China, the European Union, Korea and Thailand. A separate case on the rubber chemical TDQ from China concluded with final findings in March 2026. In pharmaceuticals, the directorate is advancing a probe into ethambutol hydrochloride, an anti-tuberculosis drug ingredient from China and Thailand, initiated after a petition by drugmaker Lupin Ltd., Reuters reported.
The 100 Billion Dollar Backdrop
The intensity of the docket cannot be separated from the arithmetic of India’s trade with China. In the 2025-26 fiscal year that ended in March, India’s imports from China reached roughly 132 billion dollars, the largest import bill India runs with any country, against total bilateral trade of about 151 billion dollars, according to The Wire. The resulting deficit exceeded 100 billion dollars, a threshold Nikkei Asia had flagged months earlier as the gap widened through the fiscal year. The Wire further reported that Indian imports from China hit about 80 billion dollars in just the first half of calendar 2026, suggesting the imbalance is still growing despite the duty wave.
The composition of those imports explains both the political pressure and the policy dilemma. China supplies India with electronic components, telecom equipment, machinery, solar gear, specialty chemicals and active pharmaceutical ingredients, precisely the intermediate and capital goods that feed India’s own manufacturing and export ambitions. Duties that raise the cost of finished consumer goods are politically easy; duties that raise the cost of inputs for Indian factories are not. That tension now runs through nearly every case on the DGTR’s board.
Steel overcapacity supplies the second layer of context. Chinese steel exports surpassed 110 million tonnes in 2024, the highest level in nearly a decade, and remained elevated through 2025 as weak domestic construction demand pushed surplus metal into world markets. India, one of the few large steel markets still growing, became a natural destination and slipped into the position of net importer of finished steel. New Delhi responded in April 2025 with a provisional 12 percent safeguard duty on flat steel products, made definitive later that year, and has layered anti-dumping measures on specific products and origins on top, from the Vietnamese hot-rolled duty to the pending stainless steel case against China, Indonesia and Vietnam, which goes to oral hearing on September 11.
Officials in the Commerce Ministry present the campaign as rules-based rather than protectionist. Anti-dumping duties are permitted under World Trade Organization rules where dumping, injury and a causal link are established, and India follows a two-stage process in which the DGTR’s quasi-judicial findings are reviewed by the Finance Ministry. Indian negotiators have also pressed the deficit issue directly with Beijing, urging improved market access for Indian pharmaceuticals, agricultural goods and IT services even as the two governments have taken cautious steps to normalize commercial ties.
Industry Applause, User-Sector Alarm
Domestic producers, unsurprisingly, have welcomed the wave. The petitioners driving the current caseload read like a roster of Indian manufacturing: JSW JFE Electrical Steel in the CRGO case, Lupin in the ethambutol case, and rubber-chemical maker NOCIL Ltd., which sought relief in the TDQ proceeding. For these firms, the measures are the difference between investing against a predictable price floor and competing with imports they argue are priced below cost. Steel producers make a parallel argument at larger scale: without remedies, they say, Chinese overcapacity would set the marginal price of steel in India and choke off the capital expenditure the government’s infrastructure plans depend on.
The most detailed public criticism has come from the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a New Delhi think tank led by former Indian Trade Service officer Ajay Srivastava. In an analysis of the CRGO electrical steel investigation reported by Outlook Business and Business Standard, GTRI warned that higher duties could raise transformer costs and slow the buildout of India’s power grid at exactly the wrong moment. India produces only 40,000 to 50,000 tonnes of CRGO annually against demand of 400,000 to 450,000 tonnes, meaning close to 90 percent of requirements are imported, according to GTRI’s figures. The government plans to invest 9.15 lakh crore rupees, roughly 110 billion dollars, in grid expansion by 2032, adding nearly 191,000 circuit kilometres of transmission lines and more than doubling transformer capacity to 2,342 gigavolt-amperes.
Srivastava also challenged the methodology of the probe. “Every imported coil must meet Indian standards before it can be sold, making the investigation a dispute over pricing rather than product quality. The product was also excluded from safeguard duties because of India’s continued dependence on imports,” he said, in remarks reported by Outlook Business. GTRI’s analysis noted that the DGTR constructed its price benchmark largely from the Indian producer’s costs after treating China as a non-market economy and citing an absence of usable domestic price data for Japan, South Korea and Russia, with the result that exporters from four different economies are measured against a single Indian cost yardstick.
The debate has spilled into broader policy commentary. An editorial in The Tribune noted that the Finance Ministry has declined to implement a number of DGTR duty recommendations in recent years, particularly on intermediates and capital goods, reflecting the government’s concern that taxing inputs undermines the Make in India and production-linked incentive programs. Critics of that stance, including the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, an economic affiliate of the ruling party’s ideological family, counter that anti-dumping duties are a WTO-compatible remedy and that rejecting the directorate’s findings weakens the very domestic manufacturers the government says it wants to build.
Counting the Economic Costs and Benefits
The economic ledger of the duty wave is genuinely two-sided. On the benefit side, remedies have historically stabilized domestic prices and capacity utilization in petitioning industries. Steelmakers gained an effective floor from the combination of the safeguard duty and product-specific measures. Merchant coke producers, who had watched imports climb after the pandemic, now operate behind a five-year duty and, before it, a six-month quantitative cap on met coke imports that the government imposed in early 2025. Rubber-chemical producers, a sector India has long identified as strategically undersized relative to its tyre industry, have secured measures against China, the European Union, the United States, Korea and Thailand across three separate products in roughly twelve months.
On the cost side, nearly every measure raises input prices for a downstream industry that is larger than the one being protected. The met coke duty feeds directly into costs for steel mills, foundries and ferro-alloy producers; KNN India noted that the levy “is expected to affect input costs for steel and other industrial users.” The electrical steel duties raise costs for transformer manufacturers supplying the grid buildout and the renewables interconnection program. Duties on PET films, if imposed, would flow into food and pharmaceutical packaging costs. The insoluble sulphur and rubber-chemical measures land on tyre makers, which are themselves significant exporters. Economists at GTRI and elsewhere argue that the net employment and value-added effects of such measures are frequently negative when the user industry dwarfs the protected one, as in CRGO, where a single domestic producer meets barely a tenth of national demand.
There is also a fiscal and administrative dimension. Each measure generates classification disputes, exemption applications and circumvention risk, all of which consume customs and DGTR bandwidth. The proliferation of exemption conditions in the coke notification, requiring end-use undertakings and furnace-capacity certificates, shows how finely the government is now trying to slice the difference between protection and input security. That complexity is itself a cost, borne by importers in compliance effort and by the state in enforcement.
What It Means for Global Supply Chains
For international traders, the operational message from New Delhi is that India must now be treated the way compliance teams treat the United States and the European Union: as a jurisdiction where trade-remedy exposure has to be checked product by product, origin by origin, before contracts are signed. Several practical implications follow.
First, origin engineering is under scrutiny. The Vietnamese hot-rolled steel duty, with its company-specific exemption for Hoa Phat, shows the DGTR distinguishing between genuine third-country production and conversion of Chinese substrate. Exporters in Southeast Asia who built business models on processing Chinese inputs for the Indian market should expect anti-circumvention and origin verification pressure, particularly in steel, solar materials and chemicals.
Second, the net is wider than China. American PET film producers face a hearing this week; the sulphenamide accelerator duty covers the European Union and the United States; the thermal paper probe names the United States and South Korea; the para nonylphenol case names Russia and Taiwan. Suppliers who assumed Indian remedies were a China-only phenomenon are finding their shipments captured by investigations drafted around products rather than politics.
Third, timing risk is rising. India can impose provisional duties mid-investigation, as it did on met coke in December 2025 and is reportedly weighing on PET films. Importers holding long-dated purchase orders can find landed costs repriced with little warning, which argues for duty-contingency clauses in supply contracts and for watching DGTR initiation notices, not just final findings.
Fourth, for Indian exporters, the wave cuts both ways. Duties on intermediates such as antioxidants, PX-13 and electrical steel raise the cost base of Indian tyres, transformers and electronics sold abroad, at a moment when Indian goods already face elevated tariffs in the United States. The DGTR’s own Trade Defence Wing, meanwhile, is increasingly busy defending Indian exporters against foreign countervailing cases, a reminder that the remedies arms race runs in both directions.
None of this suggests the wave will recede soon. With hearings running through the week, findings due in the autumn on cases from stainless steel to solar encapsulants, and the deficit with China still widening, the trajectory points one way. The question for the next twelve months is not whether India keeps building its duty wall, but whether the Finance Ministry keeps accepting the DGTR’s blueprints, and how much of the cost Indian industry itself is willing to carry.