India Export Operations Report 2026
How Indian export businesses actually run their operations — documentation, production tracking and incentive claims — measured against the public trade record.
This report is in preparation and is not yet published.
Its methodology and sources are fixed and shown below, but the figures have not been collected yet. The page is excluded from search indexes until they have been. Nothing on this page is an estimate.
Methodology
This report combines two kinds of evidence, kept deliberately separate throughout. The first is the public trade record: merchandise export data published by the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCI&S) and scheme documentation published by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT). Anyone can verify these figures against the sources cited under each table, and we give the date we retrieved them because government trade data is revised.
The second is operational: how export businesses actually handle documentation, production tracking and incentive claims day to day. No government body collects this, which is the reason it is worth reporting — and also the reason it has to be gathered directly from practitioners rather than looked up.
We do not blend the two. Where a conclusion rests on operational evidence, it is labelled as such and reported with its sample size, so a reader can judge how much weight it carries. A finding drawn from a small sample is presented as a small-sample finding, not rounded up into a claim about the industry.
Figures we could not source are shown as gaps rather than estimates. A table in this report with a missing row means we did not have the data — it does not mean the value is zero, and we would rather publish an incomplete table than a complete-looking one containing numbers we invented.
Sources this report will draw on
The tables are not populated yet. The sources they will be built from are listed here so the method can be checked before the figures exist.
India's merchandise export base
The denominator for everything else in this report. Operational problems in export documentation matter in proportion to the volume of trade passing through that documentation, so the report starts with the official record of what India actually exported.
Planned source: TRADESTAT — System on India's Export Import Data Bank, Department of Commerce (DGCI&S)
Export concentration by cluster
Indian export activity is heavily clustered — textiles in Surat and Tiruppur, engineering goods in Ludhiana, chemicals and pharmaceuticals around Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. Operational practice tends to be cluster-specific, because exporters in a cluster share CHAs, freight forwarders and often buyers, so it is worth establishing the concentration before generalising about it.
Planned source: DGCI&S state and port-level trade statistics, with Export Promotion Council annual reports
How export operations are actually run
The part of the picture no government dataset covers: what exporters use to produce their document set, how they track an order through production, and whether incentive claims are reconciled against what was actually credited. This is the section that makes the report worth citing, and it is the section that requires original collection.
Planned source: TODO(owner): ExportCRM practitioner survey — replace with the real instrument name, field period and sample once run
How we collected this data, and what we stand to gain
ExportCRM is a commercial product. We sell export management software to the same businesses this report is about, and a report showing that export operations are difficult to run manually is a report that suits us. Naming that interest is the only honest way to publish it, so we are naming it here rather than in a footnote.
The controls we apply are these. Public figures are transcribed from government sources and cited with a URL and a retrieval date, so any reader can check them independently. Operational findings are reported with their sample size and the question actually asked, so nobody has to take our characterisation on trust. We publish findings that are inconvenient for us alongside the ones that are not — if the data shows that spreadsheets work adequately at a given order volume, that is what we report.
TODO(owner): describe the actual collection method for the operational data once it exists — sample, recruitment, period, and the de-identification applied if product data was used.
No customer of ExportCRM is identifiable anywhere in this report. Where product data is used it is aggregated across all accounts, and any figure that could be traced to a single business is omitted rather than published.
About this report
Who produced this report?
It was produced by ExportCRM, a product of Easywork Solutions Private Limited, which sells export management software in India. That is a commercial interest in the subject matter and is disclosed in full in the transparency section of the report.
Can I cite or reproduce these figures?
Yes. Public figures are transcribed from Government of India sources, which are cited with a URL under each table so you can go to the original. Original findings may be quoted with attribution to the India Export Operations Report 2026 by ExportCRM.
Why are some figures missing?
Because we did not have them. A missing row means the value was not sourced, not that it is zero. We publish gaps rather than estimates, since an estimated figure in a research report tends to be quoted later as though it had been measured.
How often is this updated?
Public trade figures are refreshed when DGCI&S publishes revised data. The modification date at the top of the page reflects the most recent update, and each table carries the date its figures were retrieved.