Export readiness for Indian farm-machinery manufacturers
What actually has to be in place before your first shipment — registration, the right conformity route for your machine class, the incentives you can claim, and the distribution structure that decides whether a second order follows the first.
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Most of the manufacturers who ask us about exporting expect the obstacle to be paperwork. It very rarely is. Indian export registration is genuinely straightforward and takes a few weeks. What stops farm-machinery exports is a machine that cannot legally be placed on the destination market, or that arrives with nobody to service it.
This guide sets out the sequence in the order it actually has to happen. Our Component Sourcing & Trade practice runs this for manufacturers, and Market Access & New Geographies covers the channel side.
The sequence
Step one: registration
Three things, none of them difficult.
An Importer Exporter Code (IEC) from DGFT is the base requirement — PAN-based, applied for online, and issued quickly. Without it no customs clearance happens.
An AD code registration links your authorised dealer bank branch to the port you export from. This one catches people out because it is per-port: if you ship your first consignment from Nhava Sheva and your second from Mundra, you register again at Mundra.
A Registration-cum-Membership Certificate (RCMC) from the relevant Export Promotion Council — for agricultural machinery this is normally EEPC India — is what makes you eligible to claim benefits under the Foreign Trade Policy. You can physically export without it; you cannot claim properly without it.
Step two: classify the machine
Your ITC-HS tariff item follows the machine through every document — shipping bill, invoice, certificate of origin, incentive claim. Getting it right once and using it consistently prevents a category of problem that is tedious to unwind later.
The classification most often got wrong in this sector is the split between implements and self-propelled machines. A rotavator is tariff item 8432 80 20; a power tiller is 8701 10 00, in the vehicles chapter, because it is self-propelled. Manufacturers who make both are working across two chapters from one factory. Our guide to RoDTEP rates by HS code has the tariff-item table for every farm-machinery line, and the rates attached to each.
Step three: the conformity fork
This is the decision that determines whether exporting costs you lakhs or crores, and it turns entirely on what class of machine you make.
| Implements | Tractors | |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | Rotavators, threshers, balers, seed drills, sprayers, reapers | Tractors, power tillers, self-propelled harvesters |
| EU route | CE marking — Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC to 19 Jan 2027, Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 from 20 Jan 2027 | EU type-approval under Regulation (EU) 167/2013, category T |
| Who declares conformity | The manufacturer, via a Declaration of Conformity and technical file | An approval authority, via a type-approval certificate |
| Trade-facilitating test | Harmonised standards under the applicable machinery legislation | OECD tractor test codes |
| Typical effort | Technical file, risk assessment, harmonised-standard compliance | Full vehicle type-approval programme |
The EU is the illustration here because it is the most codified market and the one Indian manufacturers ask about most. The same structural fork — vehicle approval for self-propelled machines, machinery conformity for implements — recurs in most serious markets, with different instruments. Africa and South-East Asia, which is where a great deal of Indian implement volume actually goes, are considerably lighter, and are the sensible place to learn.
What your Indian certifications are worth abroad
Bluntly: as conformity evidence, nothing. No overseas regulator recognises a BIS licence or an FMTTI test report as evidence that a machine may be placed on their market. They are Indian-market instruments, and their job is subsidy empanelment and domestic conformity.
What they are worth is groundwork. A machine that has been through FMTTI performance testing has documented performance data, a defined test code behind it, and a manufacturer who has already been through a formal evaluation. That materially shortens the work of assembling a destination-market technical file. Treat them as a head start, not as credentials.
The one Indian test that is built for export is the OECD tractor test.
The OECD tractor test exists only for exporters
The OECD Standard Codes for the Official Testing of Agricultural and Forestry Tractors are harmonised procedures whose approvals are recognised across participating countries — which is the entire point of them. An OECD approval is a document that travels.
India runs this. CFMTTI Budni conducts OECD testing, and does so exclusively for export purposes — it sits alongside the domestic route rather than inside it, and the tractor must be a regular commercial model.
| Compulsory tests | Optional tests |
|---|---|
| Engine power output and fuel consumption | Braking performance |
| Drawbar power output and fuel consumption | Turning area and turning circle |
| Hydraulic power output | Low-temperature starting |
| Hydraulic lift capacity | External noise level, centre of gravity, waterproofing, hot-atmosphere performance |
If you are exporting tractors with any seriousness, this is the report to have. It is also, notably, the one piece of the export conformity puzzle you can complete without leaving India.
Claim what you are owed
RoDTEP is claimed by declaring it on the shipping bill at the time of export, and it cannot be added retrospectively. If a merchant exporter or freight forwarder files your shipping bills, they will not claim it unless told to. The RoDTEP rates guide has the tariff-item table and the claim mechanics — including the scheme's current end date of 30 September 2026, which is worth knowing before you plan Q4 shipments.
Duty drawback is a separate mechanism refunding customs duties on imported inputs. Whether you can claim it alongside RoDTEP depends on your drawback rate category and your export route, and it is worth having someone confirm your specific position rather than assuming either way.
The part that decides whether there is a second order
Everything above is necessary and none of it is sufficient. Farm machinery is not a ship-and-forget product — it fails in a field, in a season, at a distance from anyone who knows how to fix it.
Manufacturers who build durable export businesses solve three things before the first container leaves:
- Spares availability in-market. A rotavator waiting eight weeks for a gearbox part is a dead brand in that district, whatever the machine cost.
- A distributor with actual service capability, not just an importer with a warehouse. The appointment criteria that matter are workshop capacity and technician depth, not order size.
- Documentation in the operator's language, with the operator's assumptions. This is a conformity requirement in regulated markets and a practical necessity everywhere else.
This is the same discipline as building a domestic dealer network, with less margin for error, because you cannot drive to the customer.
If you want this run properly — conformity route established, technical file built, incentives claimed, distributor appointed against real criteria — that is what our Component Sourcing & Trade practice does.
Frequently asked questions
- Three registrations, and none of them is the hard part. An Importer Exporter Code (IEC) from DGFT, which is PAN-based and issued online. An AD code registration linking your bank to each port you ship from — this is per-port, so a new port means a new registration. And a Registration-cum-Membership Certificate (RCMC) from the relevant Export Promotion Council, which for agricultural machinery is normally EEPC India, and which you need in order to claim benefits under the Foreign Trade Policy. Together these take a few weeks. The genuinely hard part is destination-market conformity.
- Yes. Agricultural implements — rotavators, threshers, balers, sprayers, seed drills — are machinery, and to be placed on the EU market they need CE marking. Until 19 January 2027 that is under the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC; from 20 January 2027 it is under the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230, which applies directly in every Member State with no transition period.
- No — and this is the single most expensive misunderstanding in Indian farm-machinery exports. Agricultural and forestry tractors are explicitly excluded from the scope of the Machinery Regulation. They go through EU type-approval under Regulation (EU) 167/2013 instead, as category T vehicles. Agricultural trailers are category R and interchangeable towed equipment is category S under the same regulation. Preparing a CE technical file for a tractor produces a document that no EU authority is asking for.
- The OECD Standard Codes for the Official Testing of Agricultural and Forestry Tractors are harmonised test procedures whose approvals are recognised across participating countries, which is what makes them useful for trade. CFMTTI Budni conducts OECD testing in India, and does so exclusively for export purposes — it is not part of the domestic route. Compulsory tests cover engine power and fuel consumption, drawbar power, hydraulic power and lift capacity; braking, noise, low-temperature starting and others are optional. If you are exporting tractors seriously, an OECD report is the document that travels.
- Only indirectly. FMTTI performance test reports and BIS licences are Indian-market instruments — they gate subsidy empanelment and domestic conformity, and no overseas regulator recognises them as conformity evidence. What they do give you is a tested, documented machine with performance data already generated, which materially shortens the work of assembling a destination-market technical file. Treat them as groundwork, not as credentials.
- 0.9% of FOB value on agricultural implements and 0.7% on tractors and power tillers, with no per-unit value cap on those lines. On ₹5 crore of implement exports that is about ₹4.5 lakh a year. It is not transformative, but it costs nothing beyond a declaration on the shipping bill. Note that the scheme's current notified end date is 30 September 2026.
- Most first-time manufacturers start through a merchant exporter or trading house, which is a reasonable way to learn without carrying the documentation risk. The trade-off is that you never meet the customer, you get no market intelligence back, and you cannot build a brand or a service reputation in that market. If exports are meant to become a real line of business rather than opportunistic volume, the direct route with appointed distributors is the one that compounds — but it requires you to solve after-sales support before the first container ships, not after.
Devendra K Jha· Director, AgriMachinery Consulting
Engineer-leader and founder of AgriMachinery Consulting. Works with India's small and unorganised farm-machinery manufacturers on certification, homologation, subsidy empanelment, supply chain and dealer-network strategy from offices in Pune and New Delhi.
- Farm-machinery certification & homologation
- SMAM / state subsidy empanelment
- Manufacturing & supply chain