100% Indian duties on Chinese Imports

The Indian solar manufacturers have been pushing the Indian government hard, to impose anti-dumping duties on imports of Chinese and USA made solar cells and modules for a long time now. However, a very strong lobby of solar developers and utilities have prevented such an outcome till now. The Indian solar producer lobby is quite weak with few members in comparison to the large power producers. However, the manufacturers have been pressing the case hard, taking strength from the fact that USA has imposed big duties on Chinese imports of solar panels and even Europe has imposed a volume and price quota.

Their complaints have also been bolstered by USA’s unreasonable trade stance on the Indian solar policy to support the local industry. Despite India being swamped by solar panel imports especially from First Solar (FSLR), the USA government is taking India to the WTO for protecting its local industry. Not a very great case given that most Indian solar panel producers are flirting with bankruptcies after racking up massive losses. Moser Baer, Vikram Solar, IndoSolar, Tata Power etc. have been running their factories at very low utilization.

The Directorate General of Anti-Dumping (DGAD) has found that a case exists against foreign producers of solar cells for dumping their products in India. There are reports that 50-60% duties may be imposed on imports from Taiwan, Malaysia and USA while 100-110% duty will be imposed on China. While I think that the actual duties imposed might be less, there is a case by the Indian government to impose those duties to negate the negative USA trade policies towards India. It can be used as a bargaining chip to gain more concessions from foreign producers. They could be incentivized to set up factories in India through JVs. The new government to be set up by Narendra Modi will set the future direction of India’s energy and solar policy soon.