How to Buy Duty Credit Scrips Online: The Importer's Walkthrough

Buying a duty credit scrip is a two-sided transfer on ICEGATE, and the buyer controls the half that decides whether it lands. The seller starts the transfer using your ICEGATE ID and your IEC, the scrip then sits in Transfer Pending where neither side can touch it, and the credit reaches your ledger only when you approve. Get that half right and you pay basic customs duty at a discount to face value on every consignment. Almost every guide to scrips is written for the exporter selling one. This one is written for the importer buying one.

What the discount is actually worth on your bill

A scrip of ₹100 face value pays ₹100 of basic customs duty. You buy that face value for less than ₹100, and the gap is your saving. It is not a rebate you claim later, it is a cheaper way of paying a bill you were going to pay anyway.

Worked on a real line, using an illustrative ask of ₹97 per ₹100 of face. Suppose your next consignment carries an assessable value of ₹1,00,00,000 and basic customs duty at 10 percent, so the BCD on that Bill of Entry is ₹10,00,000. Paid in cash it costs ₹10,00,000. Paid with face value bought at ₹97, the same duty costs ₹9,70,000, and you keep ₹30,000. An importer clearing a bill of that size every month keeps ₹3,60,000 across the year for an hour of process each cycle. Your own ask will be whatever the market shows on the day you buy, so run the arithmetic against your real number rather than an assumed discount.

The restriction that shapes every purchase decision: an e-scrip pays basic customs duty only, meaning duties of customs under the First Schedule to the Customs Tariff Act, 1975. It never pays IGST, GST compensation cess or social welfare surcharge. Those stay payable in cash. So the saving applies to one line of your duty column, not the total at the bottom. Work out what that line actually is on the customs duty calculator before you size anything, and read how importers save with duty credit scrips for the fuller economics.

Sizing the purchase against your duty bill

Buy face value equal to the basic customs duty you will genuinely owe in the near term. Pull your upcoming Bills of Entry, total the BCD lines for the next month or quarter, and buy against that figure rather than a round number that looks tidy.

Over-buying is not dangerous, it is just wasteful. A surplus balance sits in your ledger and can be debited on later bills within the scrip's validity, which is two years from creation in the ledger under Regulation 6(2). The cost is working capital: money paid today against duty falling due months from now is cash parked for a discount you could have captured just as well by buying nearer the time. Because scrips trade continuously, stockpiling earns nothing.

Under-buying costs you nothing at all. A Bill of Entry can be settled partly from the scrip balance and partly in cash, so face value covering 80 percent of the BCD line still saves you the discount on that 80 percent. If this is your first purchase, deliberately under-buy and prove the process end to end on one consignment.

The buyer's half of the ICEGATE handshake

Transfer is a handshake by design, and the design protects you: nothing enters your ledger without your explicit approval, and nothing leaves the seller's ledger until you give it. The mechanics below follow the ICEGATE e-scrip advisory v0.10 dated 30 May 2024, sections 3.4 and 3.5, published on the ICEGATE guidelines page. Here is the sequence from your side.

• Step 1. Register before you negotiate, not after. Your firm needs an ICEGATE login linked to its IEC and enabled for e-scrips. This is a one-time setup and your CHA has almost certainly done it before. Doing it while a seller waits is how good prices get lost.
• Step 2. Give the seller two things, character by character. The transferor initiates using the transferee's ICEGATE ID and IEC. That is you. Send both exactly as registered and have the seller read them back. A mistyped ID does not fail politely, it simply sends the scrip somewhere you are not.
• Step 3. The seller initiates and verifies with an OTP. The transferor authenticates the transfer with a one time password valid for fifteen minutes. Nothing has reached you at this point, and nothing is owed by you at this point either.
• Step 4. The scrip enters Transfer Pending. An e-scrip carries one of six statuses: Active, Utilized, Transferred, Transfer Pending, Expired, Transfer Rejected. While it sits in Transfer Pending nothing moves. The seller cannot debit it, you cannot debit it, and the clock on its two-year validity keeps running regardless.
• Step 5. You approve, and only then does it become yours. The transferee approves the pending transfer, the credit lands in your electronic duty credit ledger, and the scrip shows as Transferred on the seller's side. Your approval is the whole event. No amount of money moving beforehand creates it.
• Step 6. Or you reject, and either side can. A rejection by the transferee, or by the transferor before you act, produces the status Transfer Rejected and the credit stays where it was. This is your protection if the face value or validity is not what you were told.
• Step 7. Verify the balance before you release money. Open your ledger and confirm the face value credited and the validity date. Do this before payment leaves your account, unless you are settling on a platform where the transfer and the payment complete together, in which case neither side can be left holding nothing.

Note what Step 4 means commercially. Between initiation and approval the scrip is frozen, and whoever has already performed is exposed for that entire window. That gap is where counterparty risk in a private deal actually lives, and it is the single thing the three buying channels below handle differently. The seller's mirror image of this sequence is set out in how to transfer a duty credit scrip on ICEGATE.

Where importers actually buy

The instrument is identical whichever route you take. What changes is how you find a price, who checks the seller, who is exposed while the scrip sits in Transfer Pending, and what your auditor sees afterwards.

A broker desk

• Price discovery. One quoted number arrives by phone or message with no visible book behind it. You cannot see what the seller was paid, so the desk's margin sits in the gap between the two sides and is not itemised anywhere. A quote that becomes a slightly worse number "after adjustments" has quietly taken part of your saving.
• Counterparty verification. The desk vouches for the seller. You are relying on a relationship rather than a record, and the quality of that check varies with the desk.
• Pending-transfer risk. Carried by whichever side performs first, usually you, because payment is commonly asked for on or before initiation. The desk typically holds neither the scrip nor the money, so it is not standing between you and a rejection.
• Paperwork. A message thread and, if you insist, a tax invoice from the seller reflecting the GST exempt supply. Ask for it in writing at the point of agreeing price, not afterwards.

A direct private deal

• Price discovery. None. You are negotiating one to one with an exporter you happen to know, with no reference price on either side of the table. This can go well or badly and you will not find out which for some time.
• Counterparty verification. Entirely yours. Instrument type, creation date, remaining validity, and whether the face value is genuinely available in the seller's ledger are all things you must establish yourself before money moves.
• Pending-transfer risk. Highest of the three, and concentrated. If you pay on initiation, your money is out of the door while the scrip is frozen in Transfer Pending, and either side can still produce a Transfer Rejected. If the seller initiates before payment, the exposure is theirs and they will price for it.
• Paperwork. Whatever the two of you agree to prepare. That is usually less than an audit will later want to see.

An exchange

• Price discovery. A firm quote held for sixty seconds, with the ask capped at face value, so you are never quoted above ₹100 for ₹100 of duty-paying power. The first trade on each IEC is free, and after that the buy side pays a spread that is visible in the price before you commit rather than discovered afterwards.
• Counterparty verification. Provenance is screened before a scrip is allowed to list, so the instrument type, validity and available face value have been checked before you ever see the price.
• Pending-transfer risk. Removed by construction. Settlement is atomic delivery-versus-payment on ICEGATE, so the scrip transfer and the money move together, with T+0 payout and a bank UTR on the record. There is no window in which one side has performed and the other has not.
• Paperwork. A GST invoice and a net-realisation statement on every trade, so your books, your GST filings and any later audit all read the same numbers.

Screening a scrip before you release money

A buyer inherits the seller's problems, so the screening below takes minutes and is not optional. Four checks, in the order they save you the most.

• Instrument type. Confirm you are buying an ICEGATE e-scrip governed by the Electronic Duty Credit Ledger Regulations, 2021. Legacy DGFT scrips such as MEIS and SEIS are a different instrument on a different system. A seller who blurs the two either does not know their own inventory or is hoping you do not know the difference.
• Validity. Two years from creation in the ledger, and it does not reset on transfer. A scrip that has already changed hands once carries whatever life is left, not a fresh two years. Ask for the creation date and buy remaining life that comfortably covers your import schedule, because a deep discount on a scrip expiring next month is a discount on something you may never use.
• Ledger status. The scrip should be Active with the face value genuinely available to transfer. Registration at the customs station of export is automatic under Regulation 5, so a properly created scrip is in the ledger without any further application, and a seller who describes a scrip as still being processed is describing something else.
• Provenance. The credit should trace cleanly to the seller's own exports, and the face value should be plausible against those shipments. RoDTEP credit is computed from the Appendix 4R schedule notified by DGFT Notification 32/2024-25 with effect from 10 October 2024 and amended most recently by Notification 15/2026-27 with effect from 1 May 2026, where the percentage lines run from 0.01 percent to 3.9 percent of FOB with 0.5, 0.7 and 0.9 percent the most common, and many lines carry a per-unit value cap so the credit is the lower of rate times FOB and cap times quantity. Face value far out of proportion to a plausible shipment is a question worth asking before you are the one holding the credit.

Transfer count is not limited by the regulations, so a scrip that has changed hands before is not suspect for that reason alone. For the full risk picture, including what can and cannot be unwound after you have bought, read are duty credit scrips safe to buy.

Debiting the scrip against basic customs duty

Once the credit sits in your ledger, using it is the least demanding part of the exercise. At the time of filing the Bill of Entry the ledger balance is applied against the basic customs duty payable, the scrip is debited, and any remaining balance carries forward to the next consignment. Your CHA treats this as routine. The only instruction they need from you is that a scrip balance exists and should be drawn on before cash.

Then the restriction, once more, because it is what catches first-time buyers. The e-scrip pays First Schedule basic customs duty only. IGST, GST compensation cess and social welfare surcharge are paid in cash regardless of how large your scrip balance is. Anyone telling you a scrip will settle your IGST is wrong, and you should treat everything else they have told you with the same suspicion. The debit mechanics in detail are in paying customs duty with scrips.

One point on horizon, because it affects how far ahead you buy. RoDTEP is notified to 30 September 2026 by DGFT Notification 74/2025-26, and if no continuation is notified the scheme lapses at the end of that period. RoSCTL, the Ministry of Textiles scheme for garments and made-up articles, sits on the same footing. Scrips already created keep their own two-year validity whatever happens to the scheme, so credit in the market has its own runway independent of the notification window. The scheme background is on the RoDTEP page, and if your firm imports regularly the importer overview is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions

How do I receive a scrip I have bought on ICEGATE?

You give the seller your ICEGATE ID and your IEC, exactly as registered. The seller initiates the transfer using those two identifiers and authenticates it with a one time password valid for fifteen minutes. The scrip then moves to Transfer Pending, and it credits your electronic duty credit ledger only when you approve it from your side. Verify the face value and validity date in your ledger before releasing payment, unless the transfer and the payment settle together.

What happens if I do not approve the transfer?

Nothing moves. A scrip in Transfer Pending cannot be used by the seller or by you, and it stays there until one side acts. Either side can reject, which produces the status Transfer Rejected and leaves the credit with the seller. That is your protection if the face value or remaining validity is not what you were told, and it is also why paying before you have approved leaves your money exposed in a private deal.

How much can I save by buying duty credit scrips?

The discount to face value, applied to your basic customs duty line. At an illustrative ₹97 per ₹100 of face, ₹10,00,000 of face value costs ₹9,70,000 and pays ₹10,00,000 of basic customs duty, saving ₹30,000 on that consignment. The saving applies to basic customs duty alone, since an e-scrip cannot pay IGST, GST compensation cess or social welfare surcharge, so size it against the BCD line rather than your total duty bill.

Can I pay IGST with a duty credit scrip?

No. An e-scrip pays duties of customs under the First Schedule to the Customs Tariff Act, 1975, and nothing else. IGST, GST compensation cess and social welfare surcharge are payable in cash on every consignment regardless of your scrip balance.

Is it legal for an importer to buy a scrip from an unrelated exporter?

Yes. The Electronic Duty Credit Ledger Regulations, 2021 provide for transfer of an e-scrip, and they place no limit on how many times it may be transferred. The sale itself is exempt from GST under HSN 4907, S. No. 137 of Notification 10/2025-Central Tax (Rate), effective 22-09-2025, with earlier transfers citing the entry in force on their own date. The detail is in is it legal to buy and sell duty credit scrips.

What is the minimum amount of scrips I can buy?

In practice the floor is whatever face value sellers have listed, and nothing in the regulations sets a minimum. Since the first trade on each IEC is free on Scriphouse and a Bill of Entry can be settled partly by scrip and partly in cash, a deliberately small first purchase against one upcoming consignment is the sensible way to prove the handshake before you buy at scale.