79 locations
India’s customs record read as places. Seventy-nine trading locations, the ports and inland container depots that serve each one, and the HS chapters their clusters actually file under.
An Indian bill of entry or shipping bill names the port of clearance and the declared address of the party filing it. That makes the national record readable as places — the engineering belt around Delhi, the chemical corridor through Gujarat, the knitwear cluster at Tiruppur, the mineral ports of the east. Counterparties you can reach are worth more than counterparties you can only list.
Each location works in a handful of industries, and each industry files under specific HS chapters. Two filters, not one.
The clearance point on a record fixes most of the freight and transit assumptions before a quotation exists.
A supplier you can audit in person is a different risk from one you can only verify on paper.
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Every consignment entering India, by HS code, supplier and port of discharge.
Learn more ›Every consignment leaving India, by HS code, buyer market and port of loading.
Learn more ›India's reported totals, partner markets and chapter breakdown against the rest of the world.
Learn more ›An Indian customs declaration carries the port or inland depot of clearance and the declared address of the filing party. Because most Indian trade clears at inland depots close to the trader rather than at the coast, that field is a genuine geographic signal — arguably the most useful one in any national trade dataset. It means the national record can be read as clusters: the engineering belt around Delhi, the chemical corridor through Gujarat, the knitwear cluster at Tiruppur, the mineral ports of the east.
| Zone | Clears through | Dominant clusters |
|---|---|---|
| North | Inland depots railed to western gateways | Engineering, hosiery, leather, handicrafts |
| West | Coastal gateways close to the industry | Chemicals, petrochemicals, diamonds, textiles, pharma |
| Central | Inland depots with a long rail leg | Soya and agri, pharma, auto components, minerals |
| South | A dense network of regional ports | Knitwear, automobiles, electronics, spices, seafood |
| East | Mineral and river ports, plus land borders | Steel, ore, tea, leather, jute |
A location page tells you what a place makes, which gateways serve it and which HS chapters its clusters file under. From there the chapter pages give the worldwide demand for those goods, the country pages give the markets that buy them, and the industry hubs give the whole category at once. The location layer is a starting point for a counterparty question rather than an endpoint for a market question.
One point deserves emphasis because it is where honest and dishonest trade data part company. The aggregate value tables on these pages are India’s national figures for the relevant chapters. Customs aggregates published to the UN are national by construction, and no source can honestly attribute them to a city. What is genuinely local is the shipment record itself — which company, which depot, which consignment — and that is a different dataset with different coverage.
Companies file where it is convenient to file, and convenience is geographic. When you are trying to establish whether a counterparty really operates where it claims, the clearance point is the strongest single clue in the record.
Trade data rewards a short, boring discipline far more than it rewards technique. Four steps cover most of it, and skipping any one of them is where the confident wrong conclusions come from. Fix the classification first, because every filter, every duty figure and every price comparison downstream is keyed to the tariff line and inherits any error in it. Then read at least three years, so that seasonality and trend can be told apart rather than conflated. Then exclude the most recent one or two periods, which are still filling in as late filings arrive. Then separate value from volume, because a value movement can be price, quantity or a change of mix inside the line, and those point in different directions.
| Step | What it prevents | Cost of skipping it |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm the tariff line | Filtering the wrong product | Every downstream figure is wrong by an unknown amount |
| Read three years | Mistaking a season for a trend | Strategy built on a cyclical high or low |
| Drop the incomplete tail | Reading reporting lag as decline | Writing off buyers who never stopped buying |
| Separate value from volume | Reading price as demand | Investing against a movement that was not demand |
| Check the counterparty | Acting on an unverified name | Credit or capacity committed to a company with no history |
| Record the period and source | Unrepeatable analysis | Figures nobody can reconcile three months later |
The material here is one layer of a set that is meant to be used together. The country pages establish the shape of a market from official reported figures. The HS chapter pages take a single classification down to product level. The industry hubs group the chapters that make up a real industry and sum them, because almost no industry is one chapter. The India location pages read the national record as places, using the clearance point as a geographic signal. And the trade role pages take one job at a time — building an importer list, checking an exporter, reading a lane — and set out the signals that matter for it.
Reported totals, partner markets and chapter breakdown for 99 markets.
Learn more ›All 98 chapters, each with the markets that trade it.
Learn more ›Thirty-eight industries, each summed across the chapters it spans.
Learn more ›Seventy-nine trading places, their gateways and their clusters.
Learn more ›The same record read as a buyer list, a supplier check or a lane analysis.
Learn more ›Classification, documentation, pricing, sourcing and compliance in practice.
Learn more ›Customs records cover goods that physically crossed a border and were declared to an authority. They do not cover services. They do not cover domestic trade, so a business selling mainly inside its own market will look far smaller here than it is. They carry no margin, no contract terms, no payment behaviour and no intent. Coverage of counterparty names varies by jurisdiction and is not universal, data arrives on a lag, and published periods are revised as corrections come in.
None of that reduces what the record is good for, and stating it plainly is what makes the rest credible. Used within its limits, customs data is one of the very few commercial sources where the underlying event actually happened, was documented at the time, and was documented under legal obligation rather than for promotional purposes. That is a rare property, and it is worth not overselling.
Before relying on any trade dataset — ours or anyone else's — ask which markets are covered at which depth, what the lag is in each, how company names were matched, and what happens to a historical series across an HS revision. The answers tell you more than any headline figure.
Shipment records carry the clearance point and the declared address, so they can be read by location. The aggregate statistics published to the UN are national, and the figures on these pages are labelled accordingly.
Because much of India's manufacturing sits hundreds of kilometres from the coast. Inland container depots move the customs formality to the cargo instead of moving uncleared cargo to the formality.
Seventy-nine trading cities, states and regions, each with the ports and inland depots that serve it and the HS chapters its clusters file under.
Filter the export record by tariff line and by the clearance points serving that city. That combination is a far tighter filter than either on its own.