DGFT quality complaints and trade disputes: recourse against a foreign buyer or supplier

What disputes does the DGFT QCTD mechanism cover?

QCTD is a cross-border mechanism and nothing else. One party must be Indian and the other foreign. Disputes between two Indian parties, and disputes between two foreign parties, are outside its scope under FTP 8.00 read with HBP 8.05. Those belong to the ordinary civil, contractual or arbitral route. This is the first filter to apply before you spend any time on the portal.

Within that boundary, FTP 8.01 admits three types of complaint.

In practice the third bucket carries the volume. Non-payment by a foreign buyer after a confirmed order is the single highest-volume real-world use of QCTD, and it sits squarely inside "unethical dealings". You do not need to shoehorn it into a quality complaint.

Where the file goes depends on who is complaining. An Indian complainant's file is routed to the Indian Mission abroad in the counterparty's country. A foreign complainant's file is routed to the jurisdictional Regional Authority of the Indian party.

Who decides a QCTD case and where is your committee?

The decider is the Committee on Quality Complaints and Trade Disputes (CQCTD) at the jurisdictional Regional Authority, chaired by the Head of Office. An Additional, Joint or Deputy DGFT depending on the office. It is deliberately a multi-agency bench rather than a single officer, because a quality dispute usually needs a technical view and a payment dispute usually needs a banking view.

Twenty CQCTD benches exist under HBP 8.01. Identify yours before filing, because the wrong bench means a transfer and lost weeks.

Above the benches, a nodal officer of at least Joint DGFT rank sits at headquarters under FTP 8.09, and each Regional Authority has a designated case officer under FTP 8.08. If a case stalls, those are the two escalation points that exist by design rather than by favour.

How do you file a QCTD complaint on the DGFT portal?

The path is Services > Quality Complaints and Trade Disputes, then either the 'Indian complainant' or the 'Foreign complainant' tile, per HBP 8.03. Pick the tile that describes you, not the counterparty.

A foreign party with no Indian identity is not locked out. They self-register through Register > Register User as > Foreign importer/exporter, entering name, email, country, state, city, zip, mobile and the captcha, then verifying an OTP sent to both the mobile and the email. A temporary password is mailed afterwards. OTPs are valid for 15 minutes, so the registrant needs both the phone and the inbox open at the same time.

Wizard order on the QCTD form

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Saving mid-way gives you an Application Number and leaves the file in Draft status. That is not a filed complaint. Submitting gives you a File Number and a Unique Reference Number by email, and files the complaint simultaneously with the Regional Authority and with the Indian Mission. The simultaneity is the useful part: you are not waiting for the RA to forward anything abroad.

What does a QCTD complaint cost and what documents are mandatory?

There is no ANF for QCTD and the fee is NIL. There is also no mandatory document. Both facts come straight from DGFT's own QCTD page, and together they make this the cheapest formal recourse an Indian exporter has against a foreign counterparty.

The flip side is that nothing being mandatory means nothing is validated for you. The quality of the evidence set is entirely on the complainant. A committee that receives a bare narrative and no contract has very little to act on.

Because you get five slots, build them deliberately rather than uploading whatever is on the desktop. A defensible non-payment set looks like this: the contract or purchase order; the commercial invoice; the shipping documents proving despatch and delivery; any inspection report; and a single consolidated PDF of the correspondence trail that shows the order was confirmed and the default then occurred. Merge rather than truncate. Five well-built PDFs beat five loose screenshots.

How long does a QCTD case take and what can the committee actually order?

FTP 8.04(c) sets a target of preferably three months from receipt of the complaint, and each CQCTD must meet at least four times a year. Read those two numbers together: the three-month target is bounded in practice by when your bench next sits.

The honest framing matters more than the timeline. The mechanism is conciliatory under HBP 8.05. It cannot award damages and it cannot enforce. The courts, and whatever arbitration clause sits in your contract, remain fully available in parallel. Filing a QCTD complaint does not consume or waive them.

The sequence is settlement first, statute second. The committee attempts an amicable resolution; failing which, action follows under the FT(D&R) Act 1992 and the Foreign Trade (Regulation) Rules 1993. Complaints against foreign entities are pursued through the Foreign Trade Division, Department of Commerce, Vanijya Bhavan, working through the Indian Missions.

What leverage does a QCTD filing really give you against a defaulting counterparty?

This splits cleanly by who the counterparty is, and conflating the two is why the mechanism gets dismissed as toothless.

Against an Indian counterparty (that is, when a foreign buyer complains about an Indian exporter) the statutory levers are real and are set out in FTP 8.03.

Statutory levers against an Indian party (FTP 8.03)

• FT(D&R) Section 8. Suspension or cancellation of the IEC.
• Section 9(2). Refusal to grant or renew a licence, certificate, scrip or authorisation.
• Section 9(4). Suspension or cancellation of a scrip already granted.
• Section 11(2). Fiscal penalty.
• Rule 11, Foreign Trade (Regulation) Rules 1993. A false declaration of value, quality or description on a bill of entry or shipping bill is penal.
• Export (Quality Control and Inspection) Act 1963, as amended in 1984. For notified commodities under compulsory quality control or pre-shipment inspection, penal action follows under this Act.

Against a foreign counterparty the leverage is of a different kind entirely. DGFT has no jurisdiction over a buyer in Rotterdam or Dubai and will not pretend otherwise. What it has instead is reputational and commercial: where the Indian Mission finds malafide conduct, DGFT circulates that finding to Export Promotion Councils, Commodity Boards and ECGC. That circulation functions as an informal blacklist. It reaches the councils whose members are the buyer's future Indian suppliers, and it reaches the export credit insurer whose cover determines what terms those suppliers can offer. The buyer's credit-insurance cost goes up and its access to open-account terms from Indian sellers goes down.

Worked example. Non-payment by a European buyer

A Coimbatore textile exporter ships two containers of made-ups against a confirmed purchase order on 60-day open-account terms. The buyer takes delivery, acknowledges receipt by email, then goes silent at day 90. Invoice value is well past the point where writing it off is comfortable, and the arbitration clause points to a foreign seat that would cost more to invoke than the invoice is worth.

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Note what the exporter does not get: an order for the money. What they get, for zero fee and a few hours of document assembly, is a government-channel approach to the buyer plus the prospect of a circulated adverse finding. On an unpaid invoice that is otherwise heading for a write-off, that is a favourable risk-reward. If the shortfall also has to be regularised on the banking side, see our guide on FEMA repatriation for e-commerce exports .

How do you track a QCTD case, respond to a deficiency or withdraw it?

Track the case at My Dashboard > Submitted Applications, with Scheme set to QCTD and Sub Scheme set to File Complaint. Everything you can do after submission sits behind the Action menu on that row.

There is no editing after submission. The only two windows in which the content of a complaint can change are before you submit, and after the case has been marked deficient. At which point Respond Deficiency asks whether you want to amend and sends the file back to the same officer. Once a case is Resolved there is no reopening.

Legacy cases migrated from the old dgftebrc portal behave differently and catch people out. They cannot be withdrawn and they cannot be copied, and an IEC correction on a legacy file is only possible after the Back Office marks the file deficient. If a migrated case carries a wrong IEC, the practical route is to get it marked deficient rather than to look for an edit button that does not exist.

QCTD filing checklist and portal traps

Before you file

• Confirm the dispute is genuinely cross-border. Two Indian parties or two foreign parties are barred (FTP 8.00, HBP 8.05)
• Identify your CQCTD bench from the 20 listed under HBP 8.01 before you start the wizard
• Link the profile to the IEC, and make sure the mobile and email match the IEC record exactly
• Have a valid PAN on record for the Indian party
• Assemble the evidence set first: contract or purchase order, invoice, shipping documents, inspection reports, and the correspondence trail showing the confirmed order and the default

Portal traps that stall the wizard

• Select at least one dispute category. The wizard will not proceed without it
• Complete Item Wise Details after Save & Next, because the mandatory-field matrix only appears then
• Keep the evidence within 5 files × 5 MB on Item Wise Details, and push the rest through Concerned Offices
• Tick the declaration and enter Place. The missing Place field is the commonest reason the declaration page appears stuck
• Click Add Details to push each grid row in, or the 'Please click on Add Details' error fires on submit
• Confirm you have a File Number and a Unique Reference Number, not just an Application Number

Last point, and it is the one worth repeating: run the QCTD case in parallel with, not instead of, your commercial and legal remedies. It costs nothing, so it never displaces anything. But it also cannot deliver what a decree or an award delivers.

What else do exporters ask about QCTD?

Can DGFT help me recover payment from a foreign buyer who has not paid?

DGFT can take up the matter, but it cannot order the buyer to pay. Non-payment after a confirmed order falls under "unethical dealings" in FTP 8.01, so it is an admissible trade dispute. When you file, the complaint goes simultaneously to your jurisdictional Regional Authority and to the Indian Mission in the buyer's country, and the Mission takes it up with the foreign party. The mechanism is conciliatory under HBP 8.05. It cannot award damages and it cannot enforce. Its real leverage is that where the Indian Mission finds malafide conduct, DGFT circulates that finding to Export Promotion Councils, Commodity Boards and ECGC, which raises the buyer's credit-insurance cost and damages its standing with Indian suppliers. Run the QCTD case in parallel with your commercial and legal remedies, not instead of them.

Is there a fee for filing a quality complaint or trade dispute with DGFT?

No. There is no ANF form for QCTD and the application fee is NIL, as stated on the DGFT Quality Complaints and Trade Disputes page. No document is mandatory either, though the strength of your case depends entirely on the evidence you choose to attach. You can upload five files of up to 5 MB each on the Item Wise Details tab and add further files through the Concerned Offices tab.

Can two Indian companies use the QCTD mechanism against each other?

No. QCTD is a cross-border mechanism only: one party must be Indian and the other foreign. Disputes between two Indian parties, and disputes between two foreign parties, are outside its scope under FTP 8.00 and HBP 8.05. A domestic supply dispute between two Indian firms has to go to the ordinary civil, arbitral or contractual route.

How long does a CQCTD take to resolve a trade dispute?

FTP 8.04(c) sets a target of preferably three months from the date the complaint is received. Each Committee on Quality Complaints and Trade Disputes must meet at least four times a year, so the practical pace is set by when your bench next sits. Treat three months as a target, not a guarantee: where the Indian Mission abroad has to engage a foreign party, or where the Export Inspection Agency is directed under FTP 8.07 to assess a technical or manufacturing defect, cases run longer.

Can I file a trade dispute if my IEC is in the Denied Entity List?

Yes. DEL listing, and even a cancelled or suspended IEC, does not block a QCTD filing. This is unique among DGFT modules. Almost every other service is gated on a clean, active IEC. A firm locked out of the rest of the DGFT portal can still bring a quality complaint or trade dispute. You still need the profile linked to the IEC, a valid PAN for the Indian party, and the mobile and email matching the IEC record.

Sources & citations

• [DGFT. Quality Complaints and Trade Disputes](https://www.dgft.gov.in/CP/?opt=quality-compaints).
• [DGFT Citizen's Charter (PDF)](https://content.dgft.gov.in/Website/Citizen+Charter+Latest.pdf).

Update history

• 2026-08-13 First published.