Tyremaker backs Taxman

India's tyre industry wants duties on its raw materials rolled back. One of its largest manufacturers thinks the government has it about right.

Anil Gupta runs five factories in India. He is chief operating officer of Yokohama Off-Highway Tires and vice-chairman of Yokohama India, and by any reading he ought to want cheaper inputs. Ask him about the customs duty exemption on synthetic rubber and resins that lapsed on 30 June, with a brief two-week extension until 15 July; and he does not join the chorus asking for it back.

"The duties are only liable for the product which is to be sold in India," he says. "And it is done to protect the industries, people who are making synthetic rubber against the competition across the world. So I think the Indian government is doing the right things, to see how localisation of the product can be improved."

That is not the industry line. The Automotive Tyre Manufacturers Association has spent months pressing for the exemption on polybutadiene rubber, styrene-butadiene rubber and resins to be extended, arguing that input costs are eroding margins at a point when natural rubber has already run up sharply. Gupta's answer to that is blunter still.

"ATMA continues to push to become more competitive in the Indian market," he says. "But I think the government has a more macro view on this, because they have to see that the industries which are catering to the tyre industry also survive."

His reasoning is competitive rather than patriotic. A duty that falls on everyone falls on no one in particular. "Exposure is similar to every tyre industry," he says. "So when you are in the same basket, it doesn't really matter. If it is only for me, then it would be hurting me." Yokohama also imports a great deal against export obligations, on which no duty is payable, which softens the blow further for a manufacturer whose Visakhapatnam site ships roughly 70 per cent of its output abroad.

The same equanimity extends to a second grievance the industry raises regularly. Natural rubber may be imported into India through only two ports, Nava Sheva and Chennai, under a restriction dating to 2016. Yokohama's largest Indian plant sits at Atchutapuram, outside Visakhapatnam, on a coast it cannot use for the purpose. The company chose the site partly for port access.

Gupta shrugs it off. "Usually you can always take import licences for the ports, but right now the rubber board has given import licences only for two ports," he says. "But we are very close to Chennai. There is no reason for us right now to push. Our proximity to Chennai is not very long. You can see that there are factories in north India where it is even tougher to take the rubber. So I think that is not a very big concern for us."

That is a manufacturer with a southern plant answering a question mostly asked by manufacturers with northern ones.

What makes the exchange more than a difference of opinion is where national policy has landed in the meantime. India spent six years building out mandatory quality control orders, from around 70 products in 2016 to close to 790 by late 2025. Roughly seven in ten of those covered raw materials, intermediates or capital goods rather than finished consumer products, which is to say they landed on manufacturers rather than on shoppers.

Then the direction reversed. A NITI Aayog review recommended rolling back 208 of them. In November 2025 the government withdrew mandatory certification from more than 25 industrial raw materials, among them polypropylene, polyethylene, PVC, polycarbonate, aluminium, zinc and nickel. NITI Aayog vice-chairman Suman Bery has called the orders a distortive intervention. Research from the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, drawing on a decade of Annual Survey of Industries data, put compliance costs at 10,000 to 15,000 rupees per consignment for smaller firms, with thin domestic testing capacity and standards that do not align with international ones.

The rollback has not gone unchallenged. The Global Trade Research Initiative has warned that pulling protection abruptly, at a moment when several anti-dumping duties have also lapsed, risks a vacuum that Chinese exporters will fill on price, and has argued for a phased reset with import monitoring rather than a clean sweep.

That is the argument Gupta is on one side of, whether or not he framed it that way. His position is that the state is balancing an industry against its suppliers and getting the balance roughly right. ATMA's is that the balance has tilted too far toward suppliers, at a cost the tyre industry is absorbing while natural rubber prices climb.

Notably, tyres themselves are not in the firing line. The quality control order governing them dates to 2009, long before the expansion that NITI Aayog reviewed, and tyres are a finished consumer product with a clear safety case, the category the review treated as legitimate. So the industry may end up with the best of the argument: deregulation flowing through to its inputs while its own protection stays intact.

For Yokohama, which has tripled its Indian capacity in five years and is weighing a further expansion to 6.3 million passenger tyres a year, that would be a comfortable outcome. It may also explain why its chief operating officer is relaxed about an exemption that lapsed two months ago.