What this is
A free, open data atlas of India’s place in world trade.
ValueChain answers questions that are surprisingly hard to answer elsewhere without a paid subscription: how much of a given product the world buys, how much of that India supplies, who India competes with in each market, where India’s own imports come from, and which Indian states and districts actually do the exporting.
We build and maintain it as an independent open data project. There is no advertising, no tracking of individuals, and nothing is for sale. Every chart downloads as CSV, because a chart you cannot check is just a picture.
Where the numbers come from
Two data layers, with different sources and different update rhythms.
National and bilateral trade
UN Comtrade · refreshes automaticallyEverything except the States page comes from UN Comtrade, the United Nations database of official trade statistics reported by countries themselves.
- Values are current US dollars. Exports are reported FOB, imports CIF — so a country’s reported imports from India will usually exceed India’s reported exports to it, because CIF includes freight and insurance.
- Products are grouped by HS 2-digit chapters. This is coarse by design: it is the level at which almost every country reports consistently, so comparisons are fair.
- Market-share charts use the buyer’s reported imports, not the seller’s reported exports — the cleaner basis for comparing suppliers.
- EU figures are extra-EU trade (reporter 97), i.e. imports from outside the Union.
State and district trade
DGCIS / NIRYAT · updated by handUN Comtrade has no state-level data, so the States page uses India’s own Ministry of Commerce sources instead.
- Quarterly state, sector and district figures: the DGCIS Quarterly Review of Merchandise Foreign Trade.
- Full-year state figures: the Ministry’s NIRYAT portal.
- DGCIS publishes PDFs rather than an API, so these numbers are transcribed by hand. Each card names its exact period, and a robot opens a reminder issue when a new review is published.
Trade agreements and state policies
Government sources · checked periodicallyThe Explainers page is curated from primary government material — PIB releases, agreement texts, and state industrial and export policy documents.
- Agreement statuses were last verified in July 2026.
- Policy summaries are orientation, not legal advice: tariff schedules run to thousands of lines. Verify your own HS codes in the official schedules before acting.
How often it updates
Most of the site maintains itself.
A scheduled job re-fetches the entire UN Comtrade layer every month and republishes the site if anything changed. Comtrade normally publishes India’s completed year around April to June, so the atlas picks up a new year on its own, without anyone remembering to look.
That job will not publish bad numbers. Before anything is written, the rebuilt data has to pass a validation gate: every series must be present and the right length, no total may be zero or negative, no country may appear to import more from India than it imports in total, and row counts must stay within tolerance of the previous run. If any check fails, the run stops and the site keeps serving the last known-good data. A stale-but-correct site beats a fresh-but-wrong one.
The hand-maintained layers — state figures, agreements, policies — are updated when their sources publish, and every card carries the period it refers to so you can see for yourself how current it is.
What this atlas does not show
The honest limitations, stated plainly.
Goods only — no services. Every figure on this site is merchandise trade. India’s services exports — IT, business services, travel — are roughly comparable in scale to its goods exports and are arguably the country’s real strength in world trade. Leaving them out is a limitation of the source data (UN Comtrade covers goods), not a judgement about their importance. A services companion is the next data story planned for this site.
- HS 2-digit only. “Electronics” means HS 85 — electrical equipment and phones, but not computers, which sit in HS 84. Chapter-level grouping hides a lot of product detail.
- Re-exports are not stripped out. Hubs like the UAE, Singapore and Hong Kong re-export a large share of what they import, so their figures overstate final demand.
- Reporting gaps. Russia stopped reporting to UN Comtrade after 2021, so it is absent from world-exporter rankings even where it is a major supplier. A few countries report late; each chart marks the year it is using.
- District data is national-total context. The Explainers and States pages link district clusters to national product totals; India does not publish district-level export data at comparable quality.
Found an error? Please tell us
Corrections are welcome and get fixed fast.
If a number here contradicts an official source, or a claim looks wrong, we want to know. Send the page, the figure, and what you think it should be, and we will check it against the source data and correct it.
Using this work
Free to reuse, with attribution.
The charts, data notes and written analysis on this site are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, adapt and republish them, including commercially, as long as you credit the source. The underlying official statistics remain subject to the terms of UN Comtrade and the Government of India respectively.
How to cite this site. ValueChain. (2025). ValueChain: India in global value chains. https://valuechain.international
Journalists and students: every chart has a CSV download button, and the full dataset and build scripts are public. If you need a cut of the data that the site does not offer, ask us.