Aluminium QCO: wrought products bind from 1 December 2026

What the order is

The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade made S.O. 1319(E) on 11 March 2026, under section 16 of the Bureau of Indian Standards Act, 2016, and the Gazette of India carried it two days later, on 13 March 2026, in Part II Section 3 sub-section (ii), issue No. 1262. Its title is the Aluminium and Aluminium Alloy Products (Quality Control) Order, 2026.

It is made “in supersession of the Aluminium and Aluminium Alloy Products (Quality Control) Order, 2025, except as respects things done or omitted to be done before such supersession”. Both instruments exist and the 2026 order replaced the 2025 one, so a compliance note that cites the 2025 order is citing a superseded instrument. The same pattern turned up in the electrical appliances QCO this site reported earlier.

Clause 2 carries the obligation. Goods specified in column (2) of the Table must conform to the Indian Standard in column (3) and must bear the Standard Mark under a licence from BIS, under Scheme-1 of Schedule-II to the Bureau of Indian Standards (Conformity Assessment) Regulations, 2018. Clause 3 makes BIS the certifying and enforcing authority. Clause 4 makes contravention punishable under the BIS Act, 2016.

The order bound in March, the Table sets the deadlines

Clause 1(2) reads: “It shall come into force on the date of its publication in the official Gazette.” The order has therefore been in force since 13 March 2026. That is a different question from when a given product has to carry the mark, which the Table sets entry by entry in columns (5), (6) and (7). Reading the commencement clause as the compliance date is the error the structure of these orders invites.

Seven of the seventeen entries read “With immediate effect” in all three columns: the irrigation tubes under IS 7092 (Part 1):1992 and (Part 2):1987, EC grade rod under IS 5484:1997, pharmaceutical packaging foil under IS 16011:2012, aluminium composite panel under IS 17682:2021, corrugated sheet under IS 1254:2007, and aerospace forging stock under IS 7902:2001. For those, the mark has been required since March.

The other ten are the wrought general engineering and electrical grades, and they are the ones with a deadline still ahead.

All ten carry 01.12.2026 in column (5), 01.03.2027 in column (6) and 01.06.2027 in column (7). The date cells in the Table are merged across the ten rows, which is worth saying because a text extraction of a merged cell is where a wrong date enters a compliance summary.

BIS’s own list of upcoming Quality Control Orders carries 01 December 2026 against the same ten Indian Standards, in the same order, when it was read on 19 October 2026. That is a second statement of the general date from a different document. It is only the general date: the list prints one enforcement date per standard and no MSME tiering at all, which is why the order and not the list is the thing to read when a unit wants to know whether it has until March or June 2027.

Who gets the later dates, and how a unit shows it

The Table heads column (5) “Date of implementation in general (other than micro and small enterprises)”, column (6) “Date of implementation for small enterprises”, and column (7) “Date of implementation for micro enterprises”. Read against those headings, a small unit has until 1 March 2027 and a micro unit until 1 June 2027, while every other enterprise has until 1 December 2026.

One thing in the drafting is worth flagging, because it decides a date a reader may quote to a test house. The enabling proviso lists the two columns in the opposite order to the headings. It says that micro enterprises and small enterprises “shall conform to such Indian Standards from the date specified in the corresponding entry under columns (6) and (7) of the Table”, which read strictly would hand micro units the earlier of the two dates. The column headings are explicit and sit over the date cells themselves, so they are what a supplier should work from: small in March 2027, micro in June 2027.

Micro and small are defined by reference to the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Act, 2006, so the class turns on the MSMED Act’s investment and turnover limits and not on anything in the order. A unit claiming the later date has to be able to show which class it falls in, which in practice means proving micro or small status with a Udyam certificate.

Which edition of the standard to certify against

The Table names IS 733:1983, IS 734:1975 and IS 740:1977 with years that are four decades old, and this is where an application goes wrong. The note under the Table settles it: “For the purposes of this Table, the latest version of Indian Standards including the amendments thereof, as notified by the Bureau of Indian Standards from time to time shall apply.”

The year printed beside the IS number identifies the standard. It does not fix the edition. The edition to certify against is whatever BIS currently notifies for that standard, amendments included, on the date of the application. A supplier working from the order alone, or from a secondary summary of it, would take 1983 as the IS 733 edition and put the wrong revision on a BIS Standard Mark licence application.

Export and research imports sit outside the order

Two provisos narrow the scope, and neither appears in the secondary accounts of this order.

Nothing in the order applies to goods or articles manufactured domestically for export. A unit whose aluminium output goes abroad is outside the order for that output.

Nothing applies to goods imported up to two hundred kilograms a year for research and development by manufacturers of aluminium products, on two conditions: the imported goods must not be sold commercially and must be disposed of as scrap, and the manufacturer must keep a year wise record of them and furnish it to the Central Government on its own letterhead, duly signed by its authorised signatory.

What this changes for a shop in Rajkot or Ahmedabad

The ten wrought entries are the aluminium a general engineering shop in western India buys and sells by the tonne: bars, rods and sections under IS 733, plate under IS 736, sheet and strip under IS 737, wire under IS 739, rivet stock under IS 740 for the fastener trade, and extruded round tube and hollow sections under IS 1285. Two more, IS 2067 and IS 5082, are the electrical grades that feed switchgear and conductor work, which is why this story also sits on the electrical and electronics compliance beat.

From 1 December 2026, a non-MSME maker of any of those goods needs a Scheme-I licence to apply the Standard Mark, and a buyer with a quality clause in its purchase order will start asking for the licence number rather than a test report. A small or micro unit has three or six further months, and that extra runway is the reason to settle the Udyam classification before the date that applies to it.

The interval this order leaves is short for a licence obtained from a standing start. A unit that has applied and is waiting is in a different position from one that has not applied, and this order carries no transition clause of the kind DPIIT wrote into the Scheme II transition route for ten other Quality Control Orders, nor any shipped on board cut off of the kind in the stainless steel QCO exemption. What it does carry is the export proviso and the research imports proviso, and those are the two doors a supplier should check before assuming it is caught.

EngiNewsIndia will report any amendment to this order when it is gazetted, with its S.O. number, alongside the rest of the Quality Control Order reporting from India.