RODTEP, Duty Drawback and ROSCTL: Which Export Incentives Can You Claim?

Most exporters we work with can name the scheme they claim under. Far fewer can say confidently whether they are eligible for a second one, whether the two can be claimed together, or what proportion of last year's shipments actually resulted in a filed claim. That gap is expensive, and it is not because the rules are impenetrable. It is because the rules live in notifications and the claims live in a spreadsheet, and nobody owns the join between them.

This is a practical guide to the three schemes most Indian exporters encounter. It deliberately does not quote rates: RODTEP and Drawback rates are revised by notification, vary by HS code, and any number printed here would be wrong within a year. What does not change is the logic of each scheme and the operational discipline needed to claim it.

The principle behind all three: exports should not carry domestic tax

India, like most exporting countries, works on the principle that you export goods, not taxes. A buyer in Rotterdam should not be paying a share of Indian electricity duty or state levy embedded in the price. Where GST already refunds tax through the input credit chain, no further mechanism is needed. The schemes exist to cover what that chain misses.

Understanding that framing makes the differences between the schemes obvious, because each one covers a different gap:

ECGC is in the table because operationally it behaves like the others: it depends on data captured correctly at the time of shipment, and it is worthless if the paperwork was wrong. Firms that treat incentive tracking as a discipline usually find ECGC compliance improves as a side effect.

RODTEP: the default scheme for most goods

RODTEP — Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products — replaced the older MEIS scheme and works on a fundamentally different basis. MEIS was an incentive: a reward calculated on export value. RODTEP is a remission: it returns embedded taxes you actually bore. That distinction matters because it is what makes the scheme WTO-compatible, and it is why rates are set per HS code rather than as a flat percentage.

Benefits are issued as transferable electronic scrips, which can be used to pay customs duty on imports or sold to another importer. For an exporter who imports nothing, the scrip is effectively a tradable asset rather than a duty offset — worth understanding, because it changes how you should value the claim internally.

The practical requirement is that intent must be declared on the shipping bill at the time of export. This is the single most common failure point in the entire incentive process, and it is unforgiving: a shipment that went out without the declaration is generally not recoverable afterwards. It is not a filing you can catch up on at year end.

A claim you forgot to declare at shipment is not a late claim. It is not a claim at all.

Duty Drawback: for exporters who import inputs

Drawback refunds the customs duty you paid on imported inputs that went into an exported product. It predates both other schemes and operates under the Customs Act rather than foreign trade policy, which is why it has its own vocabulary and its own timelines.

There are two routes, and choosing between them is a genuine commercial decision rather than a formality:

• All Industry Rate — a standard rate published per HS code. Simple, requires no per-consignment documentation of actual duty paid, and is what most exporters default to.
• Brand Rate — a rate fixed for your specific product based on the duty you actually bore. More paperwork, but materially better if your import content is higher than the industry assumption behind the standard rate.

Exporters with unusual input mixes — high-value imported components, specialised chemicals, machinery parts — often leave real money on the table by staying on the All Industry Rate out of inertia. If your imported input cost is a large share of FOB value, it is worth having someone model the Brand Rate once. It is a one-off exercise with a recurring payoff.

ROSCTL: the textile and apparel route

ROSCTL — Rebate of State and Central Taxes and Levies — exists because the textile value chain carries levies that neither GST credits nor the general schemes reach. It applies to apparel and made-ups, broadly the goods falling under Chapters 61, 62 and 63, and is issued as transferable scrips in the same way as RODTEP.

The point that catches exporters out is the interaction with RODTEP. These are generally treated as alternatives rather than additions on the same goods: apparel and made-ups claiming under ROSCTL do not also draw RODTEP on the same shipment. Firms with a mixed catalogue — some apparel, some other textiles — therefore need the correct scheme applied per line item, not per invoice.

For a Surat exporter shipping both fabric and finished garments, that is not a theoretical distinction. Apply one blanket assumption across the catalogue and you will either under-claim on some lines or file incorrectly on others, and the second is worse than the first.

What can be combined, and what cannot

The short version, subject to the caveat below: Drawback generally coexists with RODTEP or ROSCTL, because it addresses a different thing — customs duty on imported inputs rather than embedded domestic levies. RODTEP and ROSCTL generally do not stack on the same goods, because they overlap in what they remit.

Now the caveat, and please take it seriously: scheme coverage, rates and the interaction rules are revised by notification, and specific conditions attach to particular goods and particular export routes. Treat this table as a map of the logic, not as compliance advice. Verify your specific HS codes against current DGFT and CBIC notifications, or through your CHA, before you file.

Why claims actually fail

In our experience the reasons claims fail are overwhelmingly operational. Ranked roughly by how much money they cost the businesses we have seen:

1. Intent was not declared on the shipping bill. Unrecoverable, and usually caused by nobody owning the checklist at the point of export.
2. The wrong scheme was applied per line item, most often a blanket assumption across a mixed catalogue.
3. HS classification was inconsistent between the invoice, the shipping bill and the claim, so the claim does not reconcile.
4. The claim window closed. Nothing in a spreadsheet warns you that it is about to.
5. The person who knew the process left, and the process left with them.
6. Documents could not be produced on query, because they were assembled per shipment rather than kept against the order.

Notice that not one of these is about misunderstanding the regulation. They are all about data being captured late, captured inconsistently, or captured only in someone's head.

That is precisely why we built incentive and scheme tracking into ExportCRM as an order-level field rather than a reporting afterthought. Scheme eligibility is set per line item when the order is confirmed, the declaration requirement surfaces before the shipping bill is filed, and claim windows are visible rather than discovered. We covered the wider documentation problem in where export houses lose money on paperwork.

A measurement worth doing this week

Take last financial year's shipment list. For each shipment, mark whether a claim was filed. Divide filed by eligible. Most export houses doing this exercise for the first time find a number between 70% and 90%, and are surprised — the assumption is always that it is close to 100%.

Whatever the shortfall turns out to be, multiply it by your average claim value. That figure is your annual leak, it recurs every year until the process changes, and it is almost always larger than the cost of the system that would have prevented it.