India Adds a New Anti-Subsidy Duty on Bangladesh's Jute Goods, Stacking It Atop an Existing One

Bangladesh's jute exporters have been handed a second blow from India in the space of a week. Just days after New Delhi imposed anti-dumping duties of up to $445 per tonne on jute goods from Bangladesh, India's Directorate General of Trade Remedies published final findings recommending an additional countervailing duty, this time targeting the government subsidies Indian mill owners allege Bangladeshi exporters receive. Industry figures in Dhaka are now raising a pointed legal objection, that stacking both measures on the same shipment may not even be permissible under global trade rules.

How Much Exporters Would Pay

The DGTR's recommended countervailing duties vary by exporter, reflecting how much individual mills are judged to have benefited from state support. Sagar Jute Spinning Mills and Oriental Jute Mills, named specifically in the investigation, face a duty of $101.54 per tonne. A wider group of sampled millers faces duties ranging from $101.54 to $132.36 per tonne, while 18 additional cooperating millers that were not individually sampled but participated in the investigation face a duty of $116.48 per tonne. Any Bangladeshi exporter that did not cooperate with the investigation at all faces the maximum rate of $140.04 per tonne. Nepal, swept into the same investigation, fares somewhat better, with its exporters facing duties between $54.77 and $60.54 per tonne.

Exporter Category	Countervailing Duty (per tonne)
Sagar Jute Spinning Mills, Oriental Jute Mills	$101.54
Sampled millers (range)	$101.54 to $132.36
18 non-sampled cooperating millers	$116.48
All other Bangladeshi exporters	$140.04
Nepalese exporters	$54.77 to $60.54

The investigation itself covered a twelve month window from April 2024 to March 2025 and examined a broad basket of jute products, including yarn, twine, sacking bags, hessian fabrics and any diversified jute product containing at least half jute content by weight. The DGTR's final findings, published September 28, give the Indian government the basis it needs to formally notify the duties, a step that typically follows within weeks of a DGTR recommendation.

A Legal Fight Bangladesh Has Waged Before

This is not the first time Bangladesh's jute sector has had to make this exact argument to Indian authorities. Bangladesh's Commerce Ministry formally opposed an earlier Indian countervailing duty investigation into the same jute products, writing to the DGTR that there was "no prima facie evidence to initiate an investigation" and arguing that Bangladesh does not provide subsidies meeting WTO criteria for jute products. That earlier dispute also produced the core legal argument industry figures are repeating today, articulated at the time by Bangladesh Competition Commission member Md Hafizur Rahman, that "there is no provision in the WTO or existing Indian law to impose anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties simultaneously on the same product." Bangladeshi jute exports to India have lived under anti-dumping duties ranging from roughly $6 to $352 per tonne since 2017, meaning the current fight is really about whether a second, overlapping layer of protection gets added on top of restrictions that have already been in place for close to a decade.

What Bangladesh's Industry Is Saying Now

BFTI chief executive Mostafa Abid Khan pushed back directly on the legal basis for a country specific countervailing duty, arguing that "subsidies are given by a country to a sector," a distinction meant to suggest that broad-based government support cannot fairly be treated as a subsidy targeted at exports to any one market like India. Bangladesh Jute Spinners Association chairman Tapash Pramanik went further, questioning the legitimacy of applying both anti-dumping and countervailing duties simultaneously and urging the government to "challenge the move by India in the international arena," a reference to the kind of formal WTO dispute mechanism Bangladesh has generally avoided invoking against its largest trading neighbour in the past.

Why the Timing Compounds the Damage

The countervailing duty lands at an already difficult moment for Bangladesh's jute exports to India. Shipments fell 18 percent year on year in the 2024-25 fiscal year to just 1.17 lakh tonnes, part of a longer decline that saw overall jute earnings drop to $820 million in FY25 from $1.16 billion back in FY21. There had been a genuine bright spot this year, jute earnings recovered 8 percent year on year to $884 million in FY26, suggesting exporters were starting to claw back some of the lost ground even without any change in India's trade posture. A fresh countervailing duty risks cutting that recovery short just as it was gaining traction, and it arrives in the same week Bangladesh Financial Review has separately reported on garment exporters facing their own diversification pressure from Western buyers, a reminder that trade friction is currently building on more than one front for Bangladesh's export sectors at once.

What Happens From Here

India's government still needs to formally notify the countervailing duty before it takes legal effect, a step that gives Bangladesh's Commerce Ministry a narrow window to repeat the kind of formal objection it filed during the earlier dispute over the same product category. Whether that objection carries more weight this time depends heavily on whether Bangladesh is willing to escalate beyond a diplomatic letter to an actual WTO dispute settlement filing, something BJSA's Pramanik is explicitly pushing for but that Dhaka has historically been reluctant to pursue against India given the broader trade relationship at stake. Millers who already cooperated with the DGTR investigation and secured the lower $101.54 to $132.36 per tonne range will be watching just as closely as those facing the maximum rate, since final notification could still adjust individual company rates before the duty is formally imposed.

The Raw Jute Growers Watching From the Sidelines

Lost in the back and forth between trade officials is the fact that any sustained squeeze on finished jute exports eventually works its way back to the roughly four million Bangladeshi farming households who grow raw jute as a cash crop, concentrated heavily in the country's southwestern and central districts. Mills facing higher effective costs on their India bound shipments have less room to pay competitive prices for raw fibre at the farm gate, and jute's economics leave little cushion, a crop that already competes for the same land as rice and vegetables needs a reliable export market to stay attractive to smallholders from one planting season to the next. Bangladesh has spent years trying to move away from exporting raw and semi processed jute toward higher value diversified products precisely to escape this kind of exposure to any single market's trade policy, and the timing of India's dual duties is an awkward reminder of how far that diversification still has to go.