Even as the Centre looks to bring down record retail prices of sugar in the country, it quietly extended the timeline for India’s first major sugar‑import programme in nearly a decade.
The Directorate General of Foreign Trade’s public notice on August 20 had opened a tariff‑rate quota for one million tonnes of raw sugar, to be imported duty‑free and processed into refined sugar for domestic sale by October 31, 2026. But on August 24, DGFT partially modified that notice.
What changed was the Centre scrapping the common 31 October cut‑off and instead requiring each importer to convert and sell their consignment within two months of filing the bill of entry.
So what is the impact of this change? The original notification allowed a one‑time conversion of existing Advance Authorisations under SION E‑52 into the TRQ scheme, covering raw sugar imported up to August 20, subject to repayment of GST that had been exempted at the time of import.
Along with this import relaxation, the Centre also capped bulk consumers’ sugar stockholding at 15 days of usage from September 1 to November 30, and even demanded mills to share detailed buyer sales data for August 17–19.
The listed sugar companies also saw their stock swing with these policy moves. Balrampur Chini Mills, Dwarikesh Sugar, Dalmia Bharat Sugar and Triveni Engineering rallied as much as 5–10 per cent in mid‑August even as retail sugar prices surged past ₹60 a kilogram. However, once the duty‑free import decision was announced, most of them reversed by 4–7 per cent as investors priced in the risk of additional supply capping domestic prices.
With India’s closing sugar stock for the current season estimated at a multi‑year low of around 3.5–3.9 million tonnes, against its usual normative buffer of 6 million tonnes, the Centre states that these recent moves are a bid to avoid a supply squeeze during the upcoming Diwali‑season demand, all the while insisting that ethanol has nothing to do with being a primary driver of the price spike.
