The government is making imports meet Indian "quality standards." Surely keeping out shoddy goods is a good thing?

At first hearing, yes. Nobody wants dangerous toys or exploding pressure cookers, and a rule that such goods meet a safety standard sounds sensible. When the government issues “Quality Control Orders” requiring imports to carry an Indian standards mark, the logic sounds unarguable, until you examine how the orders get used.

Take viscose, a soft, wood-based fibre that thousands of small Indian mills spin into yarn for clothing. Only one company makes viscose in India: Grasim, of the Aditya Birla group. Because the mills have nowhere else at home to buy it, Grasim can set their terms. In 2021 the competition regulator found Grasim doing exactly that: charging different mills different prices, pulling its discounts to push some into losses, and even refusing to supply others, deciding who survived downstream. The one check on this monopoly was a mill’s freedom to buy viscose from abroad instead.

Grasim set about closing that door. Its managing director asked the textiles minister, in a letter later surfaced under the Right to Information Act, to make an Indian quality certificate compulsory for imported viscose. The order came in 2023. On the face of it, the order did not ban imports; it merely required them to be certified. A foreign supplier could now sell in India only after Bureau of Indian Standards inspectors flew to its factory and cleared it, and the Bureau cleared none of the biggest foreign sellers: not one Chinese or Indonesian viscose plant, only a handful of minor suppliers in Europe. Imports fell by two-thirds within months, and the country’s sole viscose maker had the market to itself.

The mills and garment exporters downstream paid for it. Their raw material now cost about a fifth more than it did abroad, and the shortages pushed several units to run below capacity. The damage landed on clothing, India’s most labour-intensive industry and its best hope for factory jobs, and on man-made-fibre garments, its most dynamic export line.

A standard exists for the buyer who cannot judge quality for himself, and a standard written for that buyer would accept a European or Japanese certificate as readily as an Indian one. This standard instead required an Indian inspector to fly to a foreign factory first.

In 2025 the government put the orders to a committee under NITI Aayog. The committee concluded that synthetic fibres and yarns “do not inherently present direct health or safety risks to consumers,” and it recommended cancelling, suspending, or deferring the orders on more than two hundred products. The government revoked fourteen orders across the polyester chain that November, and then revoked the viscose order itself. Orders on hundreds of other products still stand.

A rule that appears in 2023 and disappears by 2025 cannot be planned around. Anyone deciding whether to build a spinning mill must guess not only at his costs but at whether the government will change them, at the request of the supplier he has to buy from.

Keeping out dangerous goods is what a standard is for. Keeping out shoddy ones is the buyer’s own business, and a mill that tests what it spins needs no inspector to do it for him. The viscose order kept out no danger. It kept out competition for the one firm that had asked for it, and days after the government withdrew the order, regulators opened an anti-dumping investigation on the same value chain. Take away one instrument, and the same request arrives in another form. That pattern, more than any single order, is what holds back investment.