How an Importer Actually Buys a Scrip Today

Paying customs duty with someone else's export credit sounds like an accounting trick and is in fact a plain purchase of a government instrument. The awkward part is what a buyer can find out before paying, which is very little. This page sets out what a scrip really covers, how the purchase is actually arranged, what a buyer can and cannot check, and which risks survive a perfectly clean transfer.

First, what you are actually buying

Regulation 6(1) of the Electronic Duty Credit Ledger Regulations, 2021 says the duty credit in an e-scrip is used for payment of duties of customs specified in the First Schedule to the Customs Tariff Act, 1975. That schedule is the basic customs duty schedule. ICEGATE's own e-scrip advisory puts it in plain words: basic customs duty only, and not towards IGST, compensation cess or other taxes.

This one line decides whether scrips are worth your attention at all, and it is the line most often glossed over. Your total tax outgo on an import is a stack, and on a common profile the largest single line in it is IGST, which a scrip cannot touch. So if you buy at a two per cent discount, you save two per cent of your basic customs duty, not two per cent of your duty bill and certainly not two per cent of landed cost.

The practical consequence is that the instrument is powerful for a high basic-duty, high-volume importer and close to pointless for a low basic-duty one. Working that out before you start sourcing is a better use of an afternoon than negotiating half a point.

Sourcing, in a market with no marketplace

There is no government exchange for these instruments and no established private one either. Buying means going through a scrip trading desk, a DGFT consultancy, a customs house agent or freight forwarder who sees both sides of the trade, or an exporter you already know. All of those are real channels and none of them is a venue.

Two structural facts shape what arrives. Scrips cannot be split: Regulation 7(2) provides that credit transfers at a time for the entire amount and that transfer in part is not permitted. So lot sizes are whatever exporters happened to generate, and covering a given Bill of Entry usually means assembling several scrips rather than finding one that fits. And the seller is very often a small exporter who does not import at all, which is the reason the supply exists in the first place. Independent trade policy research published in January 2024 described exactly that pattern, with large importers buying from small exporters at discounts of up to ten per cent of scrip value.

Meanwhile one desk publishes a live two-way board on its own website, quoting buying and selling prices a point and a half to two points apart. A ten per cent discount and a two point spread are both real descriptions of this market. Which one you are in depends entirely on who is on the other side of the table, and there is no published reference that tells you which.

The verification problem, which is the real one

Here is the fact that shapes every buy-side decision and that almost nobody states plainly.

Be precise about the exception, because it is often quoted as though it solved this. DGFT does publish an open lookup for the older paper scrips, where a scrip number with the original owner's IEC and issue date returns ownership and whether the scrip has been transferred. That is an ownership check, not a balance check, and it belongs to a different regime from the RoDTEP and RoSCTL e-scrips in the customs ledger. For the instrument you are actually buying today, we searched the portal's public enquiry surface and its own advisory and found no facility a buyer could use. We state that from consistent absence, not from a rule that says so.

What stands in its place is a set of substitutes, and it is worth being clear that none of them is verification. A copy of the scrip. A screenshot of a ledger. A transfer letter. The word of an intermediary who has been reliable before. Each of those is a representation by the person who wants your money.

Which produces the standoff at the centre of this trade. The only genuine verification is the transfer itself: once the scrip lands, you can see the amount, the expiry and the status for yourself. So the safe sequence for a buyer is to see the credit before releasing the cash. The seller's safe sequence is the exact opposite, because once they approve, the advisory documents no way back. Someone has to go first, and whoever it is, is unsecured. Scrip scams covers what has been reported to happen in that gap.

What survives a perfectly clean transfer

Even when the trade goes exactly as intended, three things travel with the scrip.

The clock, unchanged. Validity is two years from the date the e-scrip was created in the ledger, extended from one year by Notification 79/2022-Customs (N.T.). Regulation 7(3) provides that the validity does not change on account of transfer. A scrip bought at month twenty-two carries two months, not two years, and unutilised credit that lapses cannot be regenerated. A cheap scrip near expiry is cheap for a reason, and the reason is you.

The balance, whatever it is. A scrip may be whole or partly consumed. That is visible to its holder and not to you until it is yours.

Provenance. This one improved a great deal and is still not nothing. As the RoDTEP and RoSCTL notifications were first written, a transferee could be pursued for the credit if the exporter had been allowed too much of it, or had never realised the export proceeds. Notifications 75/2022 and 76/2022-Customs (N.T.), both dated 14 September 2022, omitted those clauses. That is a genuine and substantial protection for a good-faith buyer, and it is a large part of why the buy side is less nervous than it was.

What it does not do is repeal the Customs Act. Alongside it, the regulations let the proper officer suspend an e-scrip, or a ledger, while an enquiry is pending. So provenance still matters, and the case law is unusually clear about why.

The distinction that decides whether a buyer pays

Indian courts have drawn one line through this subject, and almost everything written for buyers misses it. It is not a line between careful buyers and careless ones. It is a line between two different kinds of bad scrip.

A scrip that was never validly issued. A forgery. Here the buyer pays. The Supreme Court has said so twice, in a 2009 case about forged import licences and again in 2022 about licences later found not to be genuine, holding that a forged instrument is void from the start, that duty follows the person who used it, and that the extended limitation period runs against them. Good faith is not irrelevant, but it goes to the penalty, not to the duty.

A scrip that was validly issued but obtained by fraud. Here the buyer has been protected. A licence obtained by misrepresentation has long been treated as voidable rather than void, meaning it is good until the issuing authority cancels it, and a transferee who bought and used it while it was valid and subsisting has repeatedly been held not liable. A 2025 tribunal decision made the point in exactly those terms, expressly distinguishing the forgery line, and set aside duty, fine and penalty against a buyer who had purchased in the open market through banking channels. A further line of recent decisions holds that Customs cannot go behind a scrip at all until DGFT has made a finding on it.

One more thing the reported cases make plain: winning takes years. A buyer who prevailed in 2025 was defending imports made in 1998. The cost of a bad scrip is rarely the duty alone. Are scrips safe to buy sets out the position at more length.

What we could not verify, and are not going to invent

• Buy-side accounting treatment. We looked for authoritative guidance on how to book a scrip bought below face, whether the difference is other income, a reduction of duty expense, or a reduction of cost, and found no ICAI guidance note, accounting standard reference or departmental circular on the point. We are not going to state a treatment your auditor has not agreed.
• Surcharges beyond basic customs duty. The regulation and the advisory are clear that a scrip pays the First Schedule duty and not IGST or compensation cess. We did not find a notification that names every other levy individually, so we describe the rule rather than enumerating exceptions.
• Whether a scrip you buy can be sold on again. Regulation 7 is silent and the advisory does not address it. We do not know.
• Whether unutilised credit in a clean buyer's hands can still be suspended while an enquiry into the seller runs. The September 2022 amendments plainly removed recovery from the transferee on the two commercial grounds. Whether every suspension provision was narrowed with them is something our sources disagreed about, and we could not settle it from the gazette text. If this matters to a decision you are taking, it is worth professional advice rather than a marketing page.
• Anything you read that says twelve months. Not an uncertainty so much as a warning. A great deal of live guidance still gives e-scrip validity as one year, which has been wrong since September 2022. Pricing a scrip on the wrong residual life is a direct commercial error, in either direction.
• Escrow arrangements offered elsewhere. Several intermediaries describe holding funds in the middle. We could not find one that publishes the terms or names who holds the money, so we make no claim about how those work.

What changes with ScripX

The buy-side problem was never the price. It was that a buyer had to take a stranger's word about an instrument they could not inspect, and pay for it before they could look. Outcomes only.

• You are never the one who goes first. Settlement is delivery versus payment. Your funds are locked before any scrip moves, and release against confirmation of the transfer. A settlement that fails unwinds and refunds in full the same business day. The standoff stops being something either side has to win.
• The scrip was checked before you saw it. Provenance screening runs before a scrip is ever listed, covering the shipping bill chain behind the credit, the seller's IEC history, KYC, and live ledger status. You are buying from a screened pool rather than from a representation.
• Assembly is done for you, and the ask is capped. An assessed Bill of Entry is covered with whole scrips, oldest expiry first. The ask on a scrip is capped at face value and never goes above it, so you cannot pay more for the credit than the duty it discharges, and over-cover from a whole scrip stays in your ledger for the next bill.
• The expiry you inherit is visible before you commit, not discovered afterwards, because the expiry band is part of how the offer is priced in the first place.
• The paperwork lands with the trade. A GST invoice and a net-realisation statement per settled trade, alongside the record of the on-ledger transfer, exportable in full. The scrip purchase itself is GST-exempt under HSN 4907; only the fee carries GST.

That is the bridge: not a better price than a good broker will get you, but a trade where the thing you are buying was inspected before you were asked to pay for it. See how the buy side works, or read the whole instrument end to end.

Common questions

Where this came from

The rules on what a scrip pays, whole-scrip transfer and validity are from the Electronic Duty Credit Ledger Regulations, 2021 as amended by Notification 79/2022-Customs (N.T.) in the Gazette of India, read with the ICEGATE e-scrip advisory. The September 2022 change to transferee liability is from Notifications 75/2022 and 76/2022-Customs (N.T.). The forged versus fraudulently obtained distinction is drawn from reported Indian decisions: Supreme Court authority from 2009 and 2022 on forged instruments, and the older line treating a licence obtained by misrepresentation as voidable rather than void, applied by a tribunal as recently as 2025. The ten-per-cent discount figure is from independent trade policy research published in January 2024. The absence of a buyer-facing scrip lookup is stated from consistent absence across the portal's public enquiry surface, and is flagged as such above rather than presented as a rule. None of this is legal advice, and a decision worth money deserves a professional opinion on the specific scrip in front of you.