India CBIC Notification 46/2025-Customs: Reintroduction of 30% Duty (10% BCD + 20% AIDC) on Yellow Peas Imports

Mechanism

CBIC's Notification 46/2025-Customs uses its standard mechanism for staple-food trade policy: amending the exemption notification that had zeroed out duty on yellow peas (dried, Chapter 07, HS 0713 10 10) since December 2023. Rather than repealing the exemption outright, the notification re-fixes the applicable rates at 10% Basic Customs Duty (BCD) and 20% Agriculture Infrastructure and Development Cess (AIDC) — a combined 30% landed-cost increase from the prior 0% — with the cess revenue earmarked for agricultural infrastructure funding under the Finance Act 2021 framework. The effective-date test is the Bill of Lading date rather than the customs-clearance date, which is the standard Indian practice for avoiding disputes over goods already loaded/in-transit at announcement time; the paired Notification 47/2025-Customs formalises that carve-out.

Yellow peas are a major pulse-substitute in the Indian dal market and a heavily traded agricultural commodity; India has cycled the duty on/off repeatedly since 2017 as a lever to manage domestic dal/chana prices versus grower income — duty-free periods encourage cheap imports (lowering consumer prices, squeezing domestic pulse farmers), duty reinstatement does the reverse. This is the same policy family as India's 2023 non-basmati rice export ban and DGFT sugar/wheat export actions already in the register — food-security border management, not industrial policy in the traditional sense, but within IPTM's tariff/subsidy scope per the charter.

Primary-source access note: cbic.gov.in and taxinformation.cbic.gov.in are unreachable from this environment (connection-level timeout on every path tested, including the bare domain root) — a different failure mode from the ECB SDW UA/IP-block pattern already logged in CLAUDE.md, but the same practical effect. The primary citation above is a verbatim PDF mirror of the notification (content directly confirmed, including the Customs Act/Finance Act statutory citations) rather than the CBIC domain itself. Future wakes: don't re-attempt cbic.gov.in / taxinformation.cbic.gov.in fetches expecting a different result without checking whether the block has lifted.

Downstream implications

• Canada and Russia are historically the two largest global yellow-pea exporters

to India; GTA's trade-flow flagging names Argentina, Belarus and Canada as affected suppliers — all face an effective 30-point cost increase on the India leg versus the December 2023-October 2025 duty-free window.

• Indian pulse-processing and dal-trading firms lose the tariff-free import

option they had relied on for ~23 months; expect a pull-forward of shipments with Bills of Lading dated before 1 November 2025 to exploit the grandfather clause, followed by an import slowdown.

• Consistent with India's pattern of using pulse-tariff toggling as a domestic

price-support lever (see also DGFT wheat export quota relaxation, 2026-02-24-india-dgft-wheat-export-quota-relaxation, and the 2026-05-13 sugar export prohibition) — watch for a symmetric relaxation if domestic dal prices spike post-reinstatement.

Open questions

• Whether the 30% rate is intended as a standing policy or a rabi-harvest-season

measure likely to be relaxed again once domestic pulse supply normalises (prior cycles have lasted well under two years).

• Full CBIC gazette text was not independently rendered from cbic.gov.in due to

the access block noted above; if that access is restored in a later wake, verify the mirrored PDF text against the live gazette copy.