The Titanium Dioxide Duty DGTR Won't Backdate

DGTR issued fresh Final Findings on titanium dioxide imports from China PR on 3 August 2026 - its second attempt at the same case, after the Calcutta High Court quashed the first. It refused industry's request to backdate the new duty to when the old one lapsed, and separately declined, again, to settle whether toilet-soap-grade imports fall inside or outside the exclusion that's supposed to protect them.

What the remand actually did

On 3 August 2026, the Directorate General of Trade Remedies (DGTR) issued Final Findings recommending anti-dumping duty on titanium dioxide imported from China PR - Case No. AD(OI)-03/2024. It is the second time DGTR has recommended this duty. The first recommendation, Notification No. 6/3/2024-DGTR dated 12 February 2025, led to a duty the Central Government imposed on 10 May 2025. The Calcutta High Court quashed both the finding and the duty notification on 22 September 2025, in Indian Paint Association v. Union of India & Ors. - ruling that the domestic industry had been allowed to keep buyer names and sales volumes confidential without providing the non-confidential summary Rule 7(2) of the Anti-Dumping Rules requires, and that DGTR had not disclosed essential facts before issuing its findings as Rule 16 requires. The matter went back to DGTR for fresh determination limited to those two issues.

That reconsideration is now done, and DGTR has recommended the duty again - on largely the same terms, tiered by producer from USD 460 to USD 681 per tonne, for five years from whenever the Central Government notifies it. What the remand did not do is restore the duty. DGTR's own findings record that the domestic industry - Kerala Minerals and Metals, Travancore Titanium Products, and VV Titanium Pigments - asked for exactly that: for the new duty to apply from the date the old one stopped, so the gap wouldn't count. DGTR refused. Its own words: the duty "can thus only be imposed when it will be notified by the Ministry of Finance." Recommended is not notified, and nothing in this Final Finding bridges the two.

The consequence nobody's discussing

This Final Finding does not itself apply any duty - it is a recommendation, not a notification. DGTR held that the duty "can thus only be imposed when it will be notified by the Ministry of Finance," and it rejected the domestic industry's specific request to make that future notification reach back and cover the period since the earlier duty was quashed. So whatever period elapses between this recommendation and the next customs notification - however long that turns out to be - carries no anti-dumping duty on the product, and DGTR has now confirmed on the record that there will be no retroactive fix for it once the notification does arrive.

Why the gap runs one way

The asymmetry sits with the domestic industry, not with importers. Any titanium dioxide that clears customs before the next notification issues arrives duty-free, permanently - the eventual notification will not reach backward to claim it. Meanwhile the industry that petitioned for the duty gets none of that period counted toward the five years the duty is meant to run once it does start. DGTR did not treat this as an oversight needing a fix; the finding records it as the correct legal position - one the Authority considered, on the domestic industry's own request, and rejected changing. Read plainly, that means the period between this recommendation and the eventual notification is a zero-duty window for Chinese titanium dioxide, and nothing in the finding requires advance notice of when it closes. That reading isn't stated outright in the Final Finding; it follows from putting the refusal to backdate together with the absence of any interim measure - it is inference, not something DGTR wrote in so many words.

An old ambiguity DGTR was asked to close, and didn't

There's a second, narrower gap left open by the same Final Finding. The duty's product scope excludes titanium dioxide "used in cosmetics and sunscreen lotions for UV-absorbing and photocatalyst applications," among other named exclusions - food, pharma, textile, fibre, nano-grade. It does not name toilet soap.

That's not a new problem. In post-disclosure submissions considered during the remand, an interested party told DGTR that an importer had already sought and obtained an advance ruling from the Customs Authority holding that anti-dumping duty does not apply to titanium dioxide used in toilet soaps - on the reasoning that toilet soap falls under "cosmetics" - and that, despite that ruling, the exclusion's wording had still caused problems at customs clearance under the earlier levy, before the Calcutta High Court quashed it. The same submission asked DGTR to settle the point properly this time: either state expressly that "cosmetics" includes toilet soaps, or exclude skin-care products from the duty's scope outright.

DGTR declined. Its reasoning wasn't that the request lacked merit. It was that the remand's scope, set by the High Court, covered only confidentiality and disclosure of essential facts - and a change to the exclusion's wording falls outside that. So the exclusion goes back into force reading exactly as it did before: before the advance ruling, before the clearance problems that ruling apparently didn't fully prevent, and before this request to fix it.

What a well-run import operation does differently

An operation that reads only the duty table - producer names, dollar figures per tonne - will miss both of these. The compliance content sits in the Final Finding's own reasoning: a holding that closes off backdating as an option, and a scope exclusion whose wording an importer already had reason, once, to test with a Customs advance ruling rather than trust on its face. A well-run import operation treats the gap between this recommendation and the eventual notification as time-limited but undated - not a grace period to plan around, since nothing in the finding requires warning before it ends - and treats "cosmetics" in this specific exclusion as a term DGTR was asked to define and chose not to. For a toilet-soap-grade shipment, that means an advance ruling, not the Final Finding's own wording, remains the only settled answer.

Source: Directorate General of Trade Remedies, Department of Commerce, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India - Final Findings, Case No. AD(OI)-03/2024, remand proceedings, dated 3 August 2026.