DGFT frees atta, maida and rava exports

The Directorate General of Foreign Trade issued a notification on Monday shifting several wheat products from the prohibited category to the free category. The products named are wheat or meslin flour (atta), maida, semolina (rava), wholemeal atta and resultant atta. Exports of these will now be permitted without restrictions.

Read that as a list of products, because that is what it is. The change reported covers milled wheat products. The source does not say that wheat grain itself has been moved back to free.

The restriction ran in two steps. On 13 May 2022 the export policy for wheat was changed from free to prohibited, and in August that year the restrictions were extended to wheat flour. The government said the curbs were necessary to safeguard food security for the country’s 1.4 billion population and to check rising wheat and wheat flour prices, amid disruptions in global wheat supplies following the Russia-Ukraine conflict that had boosted overseas demand for Indian wheat and pushed domestic prices higher. Certain exceptions were permitted for specific wheat products even while the ban ran.

The loosening began earlier this year. In February the government allowed the export of 25 lakh metric tonnes of wheat and an additional 5 lakh metric tonnes of wheat products, citing improved stock availability. Per data released in May, total foodgrain production rose 5.3 percent to an all-time high of 376.563 million tonnes in 2025-26 against 357.732 million tonnes the previous year. Wheat is estimated at 120.657 million tonnes, 2.712 million tonnes above the previous year’s 117.945 million tonnes.

Two gaps are worth naming. The source does not state an effective date for the notification, and it does not list any remaining conditions, which is not the same as saying none apply. It names no official and carries no direct quotes.

For a staples or packaged-food brand the lesson is about timing. A channel shut for four years reopened on a Monday afternoon with no runway. What you cannot assemble in the weeks after an announcement is a named buyer in the destination market, label and specification artwork that clears that market’s food rules, and a mill or co-packer willing to commit tonnage against an order that does not exist yet. Reversals only pay for the brands that were already holding those three idle.