BIS FMCS: the licence a Russian factory needs before it ships to India

What FMCS actually is

India requires certification for a long and growing list of product categories before they can be sold. For goods made in India the manufacturer deals with BIS directly. For goods made anywhere else — including Russia — the equivalent route is the Foreign Manufacturers Certification Scheme, and it ends in a licence to apply the Standard Mark.

The scheme is not a formality and it is not a document your importer can buy. It is a licence granted after BIS has satisfied itself that a specific factory can consistently make a product to the relevant Indian standard.

The licence attaches to the plant, not the company

This is the detail that most often causes a project to be re-planned halfway through. The licence covers a manufacturing unit and a product against a standard. It does not cover your company in general, and it does not travel.

Two plants making the same product means two applications. A new product line from the same plant means another. If you shift production between sites for capacity reasons, the licence does not follow the goods.

The Authorized Indian Representative

A manufacturer outside India with no Indian office must nominate an Authorized Indian Representative — resident in India, named in the application, and answerable to BIS on your behalf. This is a real legal position, not an accommodation address.

There is a strategic decision buried in it that is worth taking deliberately rather than by default. The obvious candidate is your Indian distributor, because they are already there and already keen. But if your distributor is the party the regulator deals with, then changing distributor later means unpicking your certification as well as your contract. You will have handed your route to market to the one company with an interest in your not leaving.

Holding the position through an independent representative keeps the licence yours. We act as authorised representative for exactly this reason, and we do not take distribution in the same category.

What the process involves

1. Establish the product’s classification and whether the category is under mandatory certification at all. This is quick and it can end the project, so do it first.
2. Confirm the applicable Indian standard and whether your plant can meet it as it currently runs.
3. Appoint the Authorized Indian Representative, before filing rather than after.
4. File the application with the technical documentation for the plant and the product.
5. BIS inspects the factory. The applicant bears the cost of the inspection, including the officers’ travel to the site.
6. Samples are drawn and tested at a BIS-recognised laboratory in India.
7. The licence is granted for a fixed term against a marking agreement, and is renewable.

Steps one and two decide whether anything else is worth doing. They are the cheapest part of the process and the most frequently skipped.

What FMCS is not

Applying under the wrong scheme is one of the more expensive mistakes available here, because the wasted time is measured in months rather than weeks.

• BIS CRS covers mainly electronics and IT goods. It is registration rather than licensing, and it runs on laboratory testing rather than factory inspection.
• FSSAI governs food. A food exporter’s Indian obligations sit there, not with BIS — see processed food for the equivalent problem in the other direction.
• CDSCO governs medical devices and pharmaceuticals, with its own registration and its own local representative requirement.

The general Indian compliance layer — labelling for pre-packaged goods, classification and duty, the categories that need licensing rather than certification — is covered in Indian approvals for Russian goods.

Where this bites Russian exporters

The categories in which Russian producers most often approach India are also the categories where certification decides the trade rather than merely delaying it.

• Iron and steel — whether the producing mill is eligible is the first question and frequently the last one. Price and demand are irrelevant if the mill cannot be certified.
• Project goods and equipment — often several certifiable components inside one contract, each with its own standard.
• Timber and wood products — category-dependent, and worth establishing before committing to volume.

What we do

We establish classification and eligibility first, because those two answers are cheap and one of them may stop the project. We then act as your Authorized Indian Representative, hold the BIS relationship independently of whoever sells your goods, and run the filing and inspection to completion. Distributor search runs alongside it rather than after it — see Indian product approvals for how the engagement is scoped.