India opens a 5-year sourcing bridge for footwear, toys and home appliances — but foreign manufacturers need an Indian entity to use it.

What DPIIT actually notified on 25 June

The Transition Facilitation (Quality Control) Order, 2026 was notified by DPIIT under the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 2016, and came into effect on 25 June 2026. It stays in force for five years unless the central government extends it. It does not waive BIS certification: it creates a time-bound alternative pathway that lets eligible manufacturers facing temporary sourcing constraints procure products or components from manufacturers who are not themselves covered under the existing QCO regime — provided those products still meet Indian quality standards.

Ten QCOs, one committee, a two-year licence

The order applies across ten selected Quality Control Orders, including toys, protective footwear, air conditioners and compressors, footwear, furniture, hinges, and domestic and household electrical appliances — categories that sit directly in the path of global toy, footwear, sporting-goods and small-appliance brands sourcing from or selling into India. Applications are evaluated by an Implementation Committee chaired by DPIIT, with the Bureau of Indian Standards, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Directorate General of Foreign Trade at the table — assessing technical capability, past compliance record, quality-assurance systems and supply-chain resilience.

The real subject: entity structure and product classification, not “relief”

To know whether a single SKU can actually use this pathway, a brand has to answer three questions at once: which of the ten QCOs does this exact product fall under — not the product family, the specific BIS standard; is the entity applying an India-incorporated company under the Companies Act, 2013, or a foreign manufacturer shipping in without one; and does the alternate sourcing manufacturer, though outside the QCO regime itself, still meet the underlying Indian quality standard. That is a product-classification and legal-entity mapping problem before it is anything else — and it is compounded by the fact that DPIIT’s detailed operational guidance on documentation and eligibility has not been published yet.

The same summer, a second, narrower amendment moved on footwear specifically: on 12 June 2026, DPIIT pushed back the deadline to sell pre-August-2024 footwear stock that never carried a BIS mark, from 31 July 2026 to 31 July 2027, and added a research-and-development import allowance of up to 4,500 pairs a year, provided each pair is marked “NOT FOR SALE” and scrapped after use. Two separate amendments, same underlying regime, same summer — India’s QCO framework is actively being rebuilt around who can source what, and how it is declared.

Why it matters for brands

Global retail and consumer-goods brands sourcing footwear, toys or small electrical appliances from India — or through Indian contract manufacturers — now have three possible compliance lanes for the same product family: standard mandatory BIS/QCO certification, this new transition route if the applying entity is India-incorporated and accepted by the committee, or, for footwear specifically, the extended legacy-stock carve-out. A brand with its own India-incorporated subsidiary can apply directly. A brand sourcing through an independent Indian contract manufacturer, or shipping in without a local entity, cannot use the bridge at all and stays on the standard QCO certification timeline — regardless of how the relief is being reported.

None of this is visible from a product’s name or category label. It only becomes visible once a product is mapped precisely to the BIS standard that governs it, and that mapping is cross-referenced against the legal structure sourcing or selling it into India. That mapping — product to applicable regulation, to the entity that has to act on it, kept current as the rules move — is exactly Cleo’s terrain.

Two ways to read 25 June