Feb 2026
India's last published month
India stopped publishing fresh customs shipment data in February 2026, a blackout that hits every trade-data platform equally. But India's exports never actually disappeared from view. When India ships cumin to Texas or sesame to Busan, those containers are recorded in the buyers' customs books, and those books are still open, live to mid-2026.
Sometime after February 2026, India's customs shipment feed stopped refreshing. For exporters who rely on trade-data tools to find buyers, this is an existential problem in slow motion: a database that hasn't updated in months tells you who was importing your product last winter, not who is buying today. And it is not a one-vendor problem: every platform sourcing Indian customs data hit the same wall at the same time.
But "India's data" and "data about India's trade" are two different things. Trade is symmetric: every export is someone else's import. A shipment of Indian jeera bound for the United States is filed twice: once on India's side, once on the American importer's side. India's copy froze. The importer's copy did not.
Months of lag as of July 2026. India's feed is frozen at February; its top buyers keep publishing.
Source: ShipScout coverage index, July 2026. Lag = months between latest available shipment month and July 2026.
Here is the part that matters for any exporter still trying to find buyers this quarter. Every one of India's headline export stories from the last year remains fully reconstructable from importing-country customs records, with buyer names, volumes and dates intact:
Cumin: India shipped 212,502 tonnes of cumin in FY2024-25, a 39.6% jump and the biggest jeera export year on record. Non-basmati rice: 15.15 million tonnes in calendar 2025, up 25% once export curbs were scrapped. Red chilli: 7.15 lakh tonnes (+19% by volume). Agrochemicals: US$3.3 billion, making India the world's third-largest exporter. And in May 2026, three months into India's blackout, South Korea's tender bought 17,400 tonnes of sesame at $1,388–1,599/tonne, an order visible in Korean, not Indian, records.
Year-on-year volume growth, FY2024-25 / CY2025. Every figure below is traceable in importing-country customs data updated past India's February freeze.
Sources: Indian commodity board & customs filings compiled in ShipScout research, FY2024-25 / CY2025.
"India turned off the lights on its own trade data. But trade is a two-way ledger, so we read the other half. An Indian exporter can still see exactly who bought their product in Vietnam last month, because Vietnam is still publishing."
The practical takeaway is not "India's data is gone." It is that the useful question for an exporter, who is buying my product abroad right now? was always answered on the demand side, in the importing country's records, not in India's export filings. The blackout simply forces everyone to look where the fresh signal has been all along. ShipScout indexes both sides across 240+ countries, so an Indian spice house can pull a live list of US, Vietnamese and Emirati buyers this week, with no February ceiling.
Methodology: figures are compiled from public customs filings, Indian commodity boards and importing-country trade records indexed by ShipScout (11B+ shipment records, 240+ countries). "Data lag" measures months between the latest available shipment month per country and July 2026. For data requests or interviews, contact [email protected].
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Legal & sourcing notice: ShipScout does not sell, publish, or source Indian customs data. India's CBIC has, under Section 135AA of the Customs Act, 1962, restricted and penalised the publication or sale of identity-level Indian customs data. ShipScout fully complies and has no connection to CBIC or Indian Customs. Every India trade flow referenced in this report is mirrored, independently licensed counterparty data from partner jurisdictions outside India. Full notice.