What is RoDTEP and how do Indian exporters claim it?

RoDTEP — the Remission of Duties and Taxes on Exported Products — is a Government of India scheme that refunds the embedded central, state and local taxes that get baked into the cost of an exported product and are not rebated by any other mechanism. The refund is issued as a transferable duty-credit scrip held in an electronic ledger, which you can use to pay import duties or sell to another importer. It has been the flagship export-remission scheme since it replaced MEIS on 1 January 2021.

The principle behind it is simple and worth internalising: you should not export your own taxes. When taxes stay embedded in an exported good, they make that good less competitive abroad. RoDTEP exists to strip those hidden taxes back out.

What RoDTEP actually remits

RoDTEP targets the taxes that GST refunds and duty drawback leave behind — the ones with no input-tax-credit path. In practice that includes things like:

• VAT and excise on the fuel used in transportation and in captive power generation
• Electricity duty on the power used in manufacturing
• Mandi tax / market fees on agricultural inputs
• Stamp duty on export documentation
• Other embedded central and state levies that are not creditable or refundable elsewhere

It deliberately does not cover taxes already neutralised through GST input tax credit or through the duty drawback scheme. RoDTEP is the residual layer — the taxes that would otherwise silently ride along in your FOB price.

Who can claim it

RoDTEP is broad. It is available to exporters of most goods, including merchant exporters (traders) and manufacturer exporters, and there is no minimum turnover threshold. But there is a standing list of exclusions, and it is revised over time. Categories commonly kept out include:

• Goods exported from most SEZ units and EOUs (subject to notified changes)
• Products exported under Advance Authorisation, or made from imported inputs that were themselves duty-free
• Re-exported imported goods
• Certain restricted or prohibited items

Because the excluded list moves, treat eligibility as a per-shipment check against the current notification, not a one-time assumption.

How the rate is set

There is no single RoDTEP rate. The benefit is a product-specific percentage of the FOB value, notified line-by-line against HS codes, and usually subject to a per-unit value cap. The rates live in the scheme's rate schedule (Appendix 4R) and are revised periodically — rates have been added, trimmed and restored across successive notifications.

The operational consequence: always resolve the rate by HS code and by the date of export, never from memory or a figure you saw last year. A rate that applied to a shipment in one quarter may not apply in the next. This is exactly the kind of lookup that should be automated against the live schedule rather than hard-coded into a spreadsheet.

How to claim it, step by step

RoDTEP is claimed through the customs system at the time of export — it is not a form you file afterwards. The flow is:

1. Declare intent on the Shipping Bill. For every export item you want RoDTEP on, the Shipping Bill must carry the RoDTEP claim declaration. If you do not claim it at filing, you cannot bolt it on later for that shipment. This is the single most important step.
2. Let the shipment complete. After the goods are exported and the Export General Manifest (EGM) is filed, customs processes the claim.
3. Scroll generation. Customs generates a RoDTEP scroll that quantifies your credit for the eligible items.
4. Credit ledger on ICEGATE. The credit lands in your RoDTEP electronic credit ledger account on the ICEGATE portal. You log in, reconcile the scrolled amounts, and generate scrips from the available credit.
5. Use or transfer the scrip. A generated scrip can be used to pay Basic Customs Duty on your own imports, or transferred to another IEC holder. Scrips are freely transferable, which is what gives unused credit a cash-like value.

Why claims fall through

Most lost RoDTEP is not lost at the ledger — it is lost at declaration. The recurring failure modes are:

• Not flagging the claim on the Shipping Bill. Miss it at filing and that shipment's benefit is gone.
• Wrong or too-shallow HS code, so the line maps to the wrong rate or no rate at all.
• Letting scrolled credit sit unclaimed. Credit that is scrolled but never converted into scrips within the allowed window can lapse.
• Assuming an old rate still applies and under- or over-stating the expected benefit.

Where automation earns its keep

RoDTEP rewards discipline at the exact moment a shipment is busy — Shipping Bill filing. That is precisely where a platform helps: making sure the claim flag is set on every eligible line, resolving the current rate by HS code and export date instead of a stale constant, and then tracking scrolled credit through to scrip generation on ICEGATE so nothing lapses. Done consistently across every shipment, the residual taxes RoDTEP was designed to return stop leaking out of your margin — without anyone having to remember to chase them.