Cow Dung Export from India: What the Trade Data Actually Shows

Search for cow dung export data and the same number comes back: ₹400 crore. It has been repeated across trade blogs and LinkedIn posts since April 2025, usually as proof that India has built a booming export trade in cow dung. The arithmetic underneath is worth seeing. The compilations it rests on split 2023-24 into three parts — roughly ₹125 crore of fresh cow dung, ₹173.67 crore of fertilisers and ₹88.02 crore of compost manure. Add them and you get ₹386.69 crore, rounded up in the retelling to a cleaner ₹400 crore.

Two of those three lines are not raw dung at all; they are the wider organic-manure basket. And all three come from commercial compilations of shipment records — bills of lading matched on keywords — rather than a published official commodity series. That does not make them worthless. It does mean the headline is measuring something considerably broader than the trade most readers think they are reading about.

India's tariff schedule has no line called cow dung. Under Chapter 31 (fertilisers), heading 3101 covers animal or vegetable fertilisers, and the eight-digit splits run 3101 00 10 for guano, 3101 00 91 for animal dung, 3101 00 92 for animal excreta and 3101 00 99 for other. Cow dung consignments are declared, in practice, under 3101 00 91 — a line that does not distinguish cow from buffalo, poultry or goat.

Then there is 3307 41 00, "agarbatti and other odoriferous preparations which operate by burning", which sits near the top of many published cow dung export data pulls. That code lives in Chapter 33, perfumery — it captures cow-dung dhoop cones, sambrani and havan cups. A devotional product, not a farm input. Any figure that blends the two is adding incense to manure.

The practical consequences are two. Before quoting a number, establish which codes were pulled. Before shipping, get the eight-digit code on the shipping bill right, because it drives the tax treatment and the inspection regime.

The most-cited shipment remains the Kuwait order. In June 2022, Jaipur-based Sunrise Agriland and Development Research began dispatching 192 metric tonnes of cow dung to a Kuwaiti buyer, packed at its Jaipur facility under Customs supervision, IANS reported at the time. The pull was agronomic: Gulf researchers testing indigenous cow-dung powder on date palms reported larger fruit and higher yields, and the company's director described it as probably the first time Indian cow dung had been shipped to Kuwait.

Beyond the Gulf, shipment compilations place the Maldives, Singapore and Mauritius among the leading destinations on the 3101 line. The United States and parts of Europe rank high by value in some monthly pulls, which says more about the diaspora than about farming — dried cow dung cakes for rituals and cow-dung dhoop move at near-retail values in small volumes.

Across a rolling year those same compilations count a few hundred shipments from roughly 90 Indian exporters. That is a niche trade, not a commodity flow.

There is no published price series for exported cow dung, and a single per-kilogram figure should always be read as one contract rather than a market. The reason is that "cow dung" covers products with almost nothing in common: raw dung, sun-dried cakes, sterilised powder, screened compost, retail-packed devotional cakes.

Between the cheapest and dearest of those sit processing, sterilisation, packaging, certification and freight. A retail-packed sterilised powder landed with a European buyer and a bulk manure consignment to Malé are different businesses wearing the same name. Dung is also bulky and cheap by weight, which is why freight and processing — not the material — tend to decide whether a deal clears.

For anyone pricing a first order, the workable approach is to quote against a written buyer specification (form, moisture, treatment, packaging, delivery term) rather than against a number found in a blog post.

Two registrations are non-negotiable: an Import Export Code (IEC) from the DGFT and GST registration. On tax, organic manure under 3101 is nil-rated when it is not pre-packaged and labelled, and attracts 5% when it is — the same physical product, taxed differently by the packet.

The harder gate is at the far end. Importing countries treat animal manure as a biosecurity risk, so buyers and their quarantine authorities routinely ask for sanitary or phytosanitary certification, evidence of heat treatment or sterilisation, and moisture low enough that a sealed container does not heat or grow mould in transit. A consignment that fails inspection at the destination port is the largest commercial risk in this trade, and the exporter carries it.

Requirements differ by country and by product form, so the sequence that works is unglamorous: confirm the buyer's import conditions in writing, build the processing and documentation to match them, and only then book the container.

For the domestic route that absorbs far more dung than any export order, see IndianAgri's coverage of the ₹23,731-crore GOBARdhan scheme.