Clearance is where most first imports lose time and money, and almost always for the same reason: the paperwork was started when the cargo arrived instead of before it sailed.
The bill of entry, and why timing matters
Everything runs through ICEGATE, the electronic customs gateway operated by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs. The declaration itself is the bill of entry, filed against your IEC.
It should be filed before the vessel or aircraft arrives — by the end of the preceding day. This is not a nicety. Late filing attracts a penalty of ₹5,000 per day for the first three days and ₹10,000 per day after that, and the assessment clock does not even start until it is in.
Whether your cargo gets opened
Customs does not physically examine everything. A Risk Management System decides, and in practice around 70 to 80% of consignments are cleared on the documents without being opened.
What pushes a consignment into examination is inconsistency: a declared value well below the norm for that product, a description that does not match the HS code, or a packing list that disagrees with the cartons. All three are avoidable before the goods leave China.
The documents that must agree with each other
- Commercial invoice
- Packing list
- Bill of lading, or airway bill for air cargo
- Certificate of origin
- Insurance certificate, where cover was taken
- Any product registration the category requires — BIS, FSSAI, WPC and so on
The word doing the work in that list is agree. Customs is not reading them individually; it is checking them against each other.
The clock: free days and demurrage
Cargo gets a limited free period after arrival — commonly in the range of three to seven days at a port, and considerably tighter for air cargo, where clearing inside about 48 hours avoids demurrage entirely.
After that, the terminal charges demurrage and the shipping line charges detention on the container, daily, until the cargo moves and the box is returned. Container demurrage commonly runs in the thousands of rupees per container per day and compounds. These are charged to you at cost by any forwarder, ours included — which is exactly why filing early is worth more than any freight saving.
What actually causes a hold
In our experience it is almost never the duty. It is a missing product certification, a valuation query, or a description mismatch. Every one of those is a decision made weeks earlier, at the point of ordering.
We file the bill of entry ourselves in Hyderabad, before arrival, and we check classification and certification at the enquiry stage. Send us the product and the supplier documents and we will tell you where the risk sits before you pay for anything.