Bitumen Supply to Nepal: Transit, Grades and Altitude

Nepal sits on the southern flank of the central Himalaya. India lies to the south, the east and the west; the Tibet Autonomous Region of China lies to the north across the main range. The country is commonly described as around 880 km from east to west and between roughly 145 and 240 km from north to south, and within that band the land rises from the Gangetic plain to the highest ground on earth. Two consequences follow for anyone shipping binder into it, and they are the two spines of this page.

The first is that Nepal is landlocked and there is no marginal case. It has no coastline, no port, no navigable route to the sea and no possibility of one. Every imported tonne of bitumen that has ever been laid on a Nepalese road entered through a foreign customs territory. In practice that territory is India, because the Indian frontier is long, low, road-served, rail-connected at one point and reachable from ports that have handled Nepalese transit cargo for generations, while the Chinese frontier crosses the main Himalayan range at altitude. That is a geographic statement rather than a policy one, and it is the reason a Nepalese enquiry has to be planned backwards from a border crossing rather than forwards from a port.

The second is that Nepal is vertical. The Terai, the plains belt along the Indian frontier, is the low ground of the country: the standard physiographic description places it below about 300 m, and much of the belt, including the towns at the principal crossings, lies well under 150 m. It is hot, humid, subtropical, and in every respect that matters to a pavement it behaves like the northern Indian plain on the other side of the line, because it is the same plain. North of it the Siwalik and Mahabharat ranges rise into the Middle Hills, where the Kathmandu valley floor sits at roughly 1,400 m and winter nights are cool enough to matter. North of that again the high mountain districts carry roads that cross passes well above 3,000 m and endure genuine winters with snow, frost and freeze–thaw cycling. A supplier who answers what grade does Nepal use with a single grade has not asked where the site is, and the answer is wrong for most of the country whichever grade is named.

Why the transit dimension dominates the arithmetic

Bitumen is heavy and low in value density. A tonne of paving binder is worth a small fraction of a tonne of most cargo that occupies the same container and weighs the same. Freight is therefore a large share of landed cost rather than a rounding error — and on this route the freight has three distinct segments rather than one. There is an ocean leg to an Indian east-coast port. There is an overland or rail leg across a foreign country to a land frontier. And there is a Nepalese leg from the frontier to the site, which for a Terai destination may be short and for a hill or mountain destination is slow, steep and constrained by the size of vehicle the road will take.

The commercial consequence is blunt and it is the first thing to settle in writing. A price quoted CIF Kolkata or CIF Haldia is a proper offer and it prices the first segment. For a project in Kathmandu, Pokhara, Butwal or Nepalgunj it leaves the two segments that carry the customs risk, the frontier, the transhipment and the mountain road entirely open. Two offers into Nepal cannot be compared unless they are expressed at the same named inland place, and an offer that names a port is not answering the question a Nepalese buyer asked.

Transit is a different procedure, not a longer delivery

This is the point that most first-time exporters into Nepal get wrong, and it is worth stating in its bare form before the detail arrives further down the page. When a consignment is discharged at an Indian port for a Nepalese buyer, it is not imported into India. It is entered under a customs transit procedure, secured, routed to a nominated land customs station on the Indian side of the frontier, and presented there. The import happens on the Nepalese side, at the Nepalese customs office, against a Nepalese declaration lodged by a Nepalese importer of record. Three things follow immediately:

• There are two customs files, in two countries, on one consignment. They are opened at different times, by different parties, in different systems, and a document that satisfies one does not automatically satisfy the other.
• The delivery term must name an inland place. Under Incoterms 2020 the rules built around a vessel and a port — FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF — have coherent meaning at Kolkata or Haldia and no coherent meaning at Birgunj, Bhairahawa or Kathmandu, because there is no vessel and no ship’s rail at a land frontier. The rules that work for any mode are FCA, CPT, CIP, DAP, DPU and DDP, and every one of them names a place.
• The goods cannot be dealt with along the way. A movement running under a customs transit procedure to a nominated office is not one that can conveniently be split between two receivers, partly discharged, decanted or reblended in the transit country, because the whole mechanism rests on the goods that arrive being demonstrably the goods that entered. That constraint is structural rather than administrative, and it is one of the strongest practical arguments against a bulk tanker on this route.

The crossings, and why an enquiry often names the wrong side of one

Nepalese import traffic concentrates on a small number of land crossings, and each of them is a pair of places facing each other across a line. Birgunj on the Nepalese side faces Raxaul in the Indian state of Bihar and is the principal crossing for Nepalese third-country trade; it is the only one served by rail, through the Sirsiya inland container depot. Bhairahawa faces Sunauli in Uttar Pradesh and serves the western hills, Butwal and the road to Pokhara. Biratnagar faces Jogbani in Bihar and serves the eastern Terai and the eastern hills. Nepalgunj faces Rupaidiha in Uttar Pradesh and is the gateway to the mid-western and far-western hills and the Karnali. Kakarbhitta faces Panitanki in West Bengal at the far eastern end of the country, close to Siliguri.

Because each crossing has two names, enquiries routinely describe the same movement from opposite sides, and a supplier who does not recognise the pairs will treat two quotations as two markets. Worse, a routing decided on the Indian name may be the wrong crossing for the Nepalese destination, because the crossings do not substitute for one another: the roads inland from each of them go to different parts of a country whose internal east–west movement is slow. Fix the Nepalese delivery town first, then choose the crossing, then choose the port. That sequence is the opposite of the one a first-time exporter uses, and it is the correct one.

The specification position, stated once at the top

Nepalese road specification practice sits close to Indian practice, and the practical consequence is that the grade names a Nepalese tender is most likely to use are the IS 73 viscosity grades: VG-10, VG-20, VG-30 and VG-40. This page does not restate those tables, because the viscosity grade bitumen and India pages linked at the foot of this page carry them. What it does do, at length, is explain the one thing that costs exporters money on this market and that a grade table does not show: a viscosity grade and a penetration grade are defined by different properties measured at different temperatures, and one certificate does not evidence the other. A penetration grade is a closed band measured at 25 °C. A viscosity grade is defined by absolute viscosity at 60 °C, close to service temperature, and the penetration line inside it is a minimum with no upper bound at all. An offer that answers a VG-30 clause with a 60/70 certificate has not measured the property the clause is built on. That argument is set out in full further down, with the arithmetic.

The season, which is shorter than the calendar suggests

Nepal is a monsoon country. The south-west monsoon conventionally arrives in the east around the second week of June and withdraws around late September or early October, and the great majority of the year’s precipitation falls inside that window — commonly cited at around eighty per cent nationally. Roadworks and asphalt laying are effectively suspended for the duration in most of the country, which compresses the construction season into the months either side of it. At altitude winter takes a further bite out of the other end. The practical result is a market where material has to be pre-positioned rather than called off, where demand concentrates into predictable weeks, and where a consignment that misses a window waits for the next one rather than arriving late. The climate section sets this out zone by zone, together with the landslide season that follows the monsoon in the hills, described as a climatic risk to routing rather than as a claim about the state of any road on any date.

The five things that decide a Nepalese order

• The delivery town, not the country, and roughly how high it is. Terai, Middle Hills or high mountain are three different binder conversations and three different transport propositions.
• Which crossing, and therefore which Indian port. The crossing is chosen by the Nepalese destination; the port is chosen by the crossing. Doing it the other way round produces an unnecessary inland leg in the wrong country.
• Which grade system the clause is written in, and which grade. A viscosity grade and a penetration grade are not translations, and the ageing evidence differs as well as the grade name.
• Packing, decided by the inland leg rather than by the packaging cost. The combination of a foreign transit leg, a transhipment at the frontier and a mountain road is why drums dominate this market.
• Which conformity and customs requirements apply, and in which of the two territories. The destination is Nepal; the transit country is India; the questions are different and both have to be put to a licensed customs broker.

What this page does not tell you

It does not state that any port, berth, terminal, road, railway, inland container depot, border post or transit service is open today, running to a schedule, equipped for this commodity or available for your cargo. Geography is described because geography is stable and publicly checkable; operating status is not, it changes, and it belongs to the freight forwarder who is accountable for it. Road distances, where given at all, are commonly cited approximations for orientation and are not a basis for a freight calculation. No transit times, freight rates, vehicle payloads, vessel or tanker capacities, port throughput or draught figures, container free time periods, detention charges, duty rates, taxes, levies, exchange rates or currency parities appear anywhere. No haulier, forwarder, terminal operator, clearing agent, inspection body, railway operator, refinery, product brand or client is named as a counterparty, and no presence, office, agency or shipping history in Nepal, India, Bangladesh or China is claimed. It states no position on whether bitumen is currently within the scope of any conformity, certification or import-control scheme in any country on the route, and it names no currently appointed inspection agent, for the reason set out at length in the conformity section. It quotes no Nepalese national standard designation for paving bitumen. And it is not legal, customs, regulatory, insurance or compliance advice; a buyer moving goods across these frontiers must take independent advice covering the goods, the parties, every customs territory on the route and the payment mechanism.

The legal frame, described as a frame

The right of a landlocked state to move goods across a neighbour’s territory is not an informal courtesy; it rests on a stack of instruments, and understanding the stack explains why the paperwork looks the way it does. At the multilateral level, freedom of transit is addressed in Article V of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and there is a dedicated United Nations Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States concluded in 1965. At the bilateral level, Nepal’s third-country trade across India has long been governed by a treaty of transit between Nepal and India, periodically renewed and revised, with subordinate protocols and memoranda setting out routes, nominated customs points, procedures and the treatment of particular categories of goods.

This page describes that arrangement as a mechanism and states nothing about its current terms, its current renewal position, the routes currently nominated under it or the treatment of any particular commodity within it. Those change, they are settled between two governments, and an undated supplier page asserting them is precise enough for a buyer to plan a shipment on and wrong often enough to ruin one. Get the current position in writing and dated from a licensed customs broker in Nepal, and get it again if the shipment slips.

Transit is a procedure, not a longer delivery

The structural features of a transit regime are stable even when the detail is not, and they are worth stating because they are what makes a Nepalese shipment different from a coastal one.

• The goods do not enter the transit country’s economy. They are landed and moved under a customs procedure that suspends the duties and taxes that would otherwise fall due, on the basis that they will leave again at a nominated point. Nothing about that movement is an import into the transit country, and nobody in the transit country is the importer of record.
• A declaration specific to transit is used. For Nepal-bound traffic across India the instrument is conventionally a customs transit declaration, commonly referred to by the initials CTD, lodged for the movement from the port of landing to the nominated Indian land customs station. Its current form, content, lodgement route and supporting requirements are matters for a licensed broker and are not described here.
• The movement is secured. Because duties are suspended rather than paid, the transit country requires security — conventionally a bond, a bank guarantee or an equivalent instrument — standing in for the charges that would fall due if the goods failed to leave. Somebody has to provide it, it has a value, and it has a cost. Ask at the enquiry stage who provides it and how it is priced, because it is a real line and it is frequently invisible in a first quotation.
• The route and the exit point are nominated, not chosen en route. A transit movement runs from a stated port to a stated land customs station. It is not an opportunistic routing that can be redirected because a road is busy, and it cannot be split between two crossings because a buyer has two sites.
• The goods cannot be dealt with along the way. No partial discharge, no decanting, no reblending, no sale in the transit country. This is the structural reason a bulk tanker is a poor fit for this route, and it is also why a single order destined for two Nepalese regions is best planned as two consignments from the enquiry rather than discovered as such at the frontier.
• Discharge of the procedure happens at the exit. The security is released when the goods are accounted for at the nominated station. Until then the movement is live and somebody carries the exposure.

The two customs files, and the order they are opened in

A Nepalese consignment generates two entirely separate customs events. On the Indian side there is the port entry and the transit declaration, handled by an Indian clearing agent acting for whoever is the party of record for the transit movement. On the Nepalese side there is the import declaration — known locally as the pragyapan patra — lodged at the Nepalese customs office facing the crossing, by a Nepalese importer with the registrations that Nepalese law requires. Nepal’s customs administration sits under the ministry responsible for finance and operates an electronic declaration system of the UNCTAD ASYCUDA family; importers are ordinarily required to hold the registrations and identifiers that the customs and central bank framework specifies, including an export–import code and tax registration. Which registrations apply to a particular buyer, and what evidence they need from the seller, is a broker question.

The practical consequence for a seller is one that first-time exporters miss. The commercial documents are needed earlier than on a coastal shipment, and they are needed by two different parties. The transit declaration on the Indian side and the import declaration on the Nepalese side both draw on the invoice, the packing list, the transport document and the certificate of origin, and a discrepancy between the copies used on either side of the frontier is a hold in a country where neither the seller nor the buyer is standing. Fix the goods description word for word at contract stage and never let it drift across the invoice, the packing list, the bill of lading, the transit declaration, the certificate of analysis and the credit.

Rail, the Sirsiya depot, and what a rail arrival changes

Nepal has no extensive national railway network of the kind that carries freight inland from a frontier. What it has, and what makes Birgunj the principal crossing, is a broad-gauge rail link across the frontier from Raxaul to the Sirsiya inland container depot at Birgunj, which physically connects Nepalese inland clearance to the Indian railway network. The gauge is the Indian broad gauge, so there is no break of gauge on the Indian side of the movement — a genuine structural advantage that several other landlocked corridors described elsewhere on this site do not have.

What a rail arrival changes, if one is available, is the handling profile rather than the customs position. The container moves inland as a unit and is stripped at an inland depot rather than at the port, which reduces the number of road handling events but concentrates them at a single place with a single set of records. What it does not change is the transit procedure, the security, the nominated exit or the fact that the goods are imported in Nepal rather than in India. And whether any rail service is running, whether it accepts this commodity, whether it accepts your packing and what the wagon and container arrangements are, are operating matters that change and belong to a freight forwarder in writing. Nothing on this page asserts that a rail movement is available.

The road legs, and the three of them there are

A Nepal-bound consignment has, at most, three road segments and each has a different character.

• The Indian leg, from the port to the frontier. Long, on a foreign network, under a transit procedure, with the vehicle and the goods secured. This is the segment where the transit security is live and where a discrepancy between documents and load has the most expensive consequences.
• The Terai leg, from the crossing along the plain. Nepal’s East–West Highway, the Mahendra Highway, runs the length of the Terai from Mechinagar in the east to Bhimdatta in the far west and is commonly cited at around a thousand kilometres. It is flat, and by Nepalese standards it is fast. It is also, for most of that distance, the only through east–west route in the country, which is why a cargo landed at the wrong end of the Terai stays wrong.
• The hill leg, from the plain to the site. This is the segment that decides the packing. Roads such as the Tribhuvan Highway from Hetauda over the pass at Daman, the Narayangadh to Mugling road up the Trishuli, the Prithvi Highway to Pokhara and the Siddhartha Highway from Butwal through Palpa are mountain roads with gradients, tight radii and river gorges. The practical maximum vehicle is set by the road rather than by a weight table, and a consignment that arrives at the Terai in one vehicle may need to leave it in several.

Container detention, and the cost line that catches Nepal buyers

On a coastal delivery a container is emptied near the port and returned to the line without leaving the customs territory it landed in. On a Nepalese delivery the box crosses an international frontier with the cargo and has to come back across it, and the round trip is measured accordingly. Shipping lines allow a contractually agreed period of free time and charge detention thereafter; the free period and the charge are commercial terms between the buyer and the line, and no figures are stated here. The exposure is real enough that stripping at an inland depot at or near the crossing and moving drums onward on Nepalese vehicles is a routine plan rather than an exception. That decision has to be made before the cargo is booked, because it changes the packing plan, the handling count, the insurance arrangement and the number of places a drum count can be disputed. Ask the question at the enquiry stage rather than discovering it on an invoice.

The delivery term has to name an inland place, and here it has to name the right one

Under Incoterms 2020, FAS, FOB, CFR and CIF are rules for sea and inland waterway transport. They are built around a vessel and a port, they have coherent meaning for a parcel discharging at Kolkata, Haldia or Visakhapatnam, and they have no coherent meaning for a truck arriving at Birgunj or a container stripped at Bhairahawa, because there is no vessel and no ship’s rail at a land frontier. The rules that work for any mode are FCA, CPT, CIP, DAP, DPU and DDP, and every one of them requires a named place.

Four errors recur on Nepalese business, and three of them are specific to a landlocked destination:

• Quoting CIF Kolkata against a Kathmandu project and calling it a delivered price. It is not. It prices the sea leg and leaves the transit leg, the frontier, the transhipment and the climb to the valley open. If a CIF port price is quoted, label it as what it is on the face of the offer so the buyer compares like with like.
• Naming a country rather than a place. DAP Nepal is not a delivery term. DAP followed by a named town, depot, plant or project site is. On this route the named place must also settle who arranges the formalities at the frontier and who bears the cost of a vehicle standing and waiting, because on a land movement the truck and the driver are idle at somebody’s expense while a declaration is processed.
• Naming an inland place in the wrong country and calling it delivered. A term naming Raxaul is a term ending on the Indian side of the line. A term naming Birgunj is a term ending on the Nepalese side. Those are different obligations with a customs frontier between them, and the difference is precisely the part of the journey a Nepalese buyer most wants priced. Say which side of the line the named place is on, in words.
• Agreeing DDP into Nepal casually. DDP puts import clearance and charges on the seller. In a country where the seller has no presence, cannot hold the local registrations and cannot be the importer of record, that is a far heavier undertaking than it looks on a term sheet, and on this route it also drags the seller into a transit procedure in a third country. Treat DDP as an exception requiring deliberate structuring, not as a convenience.

Insurance, and the gap after the port

Two points are specific enough to be worth stating carefully. First, a marine cargo policy that ends at the Indian port does not cover a movement across India and into Nepal. Inland transit cover has to be arranged deliberately and it has to run across the frontier rather than stopping at it; a policy that lapses at the line leaves the most handling-intensive part of the journey uncovered. Carrier liability under a road carriage arrangement is limited and is not cargo insurance, and it will not make a buyer whole on a full load lost on a hill road. This is the most commonly missed line on a first Nepalese shipment. Second, the delivery term and the insurance arrangement have to be chosen together rather than in sequence: CIF and CIP are the rules under which the seller procures cover, and a buyer intending to place cover locally should be contracting on CFR, CPT or FOB instead. Confirm the position, including any local placement requirement in the destination, with an insurance broker before the delivery term is agreed rather than afterwards.

Payment, the currency relationship, and the credit

One currency point is worth knowing before a Nepalese negotiation starts, because it is specific to this pair of countries and it shapes how a buyer reads a price. The Nepalese rupee has long been maintained at a fixed relationship to the Indian rupee rather than floating independently against it, so a Nepalese buyer’s exposure on a dollar-denominated contract moves with the Indian rupee in a way it would not in any other market on this site, and a comparison against an Indian landed price is not distorted by a cross rate between the two currencies. That is a structural description rather than a quotation of any rate: no rate, parity figure or forecast is stated on this page, and the current position and any hedging arrangement belong to the buyer’s bank. Import payment itself is regulated through the framework administered by the central bank, and letters of credit are the ordinary instrument for a cargo of this size and character. A documentary credit is a mechanism for paying against documents, and on this route the documents are the whole exposure, so the credit has to be drafted against the documents that will actually exist. Two Nepal-specific cautions. Do not draft a credit calling for a document that a transit movement does not generate, and do not call for a document only obtainable in the destination as a condition of a payment that has to be made before the goods get there. And settle at drafting stage which transport document the credit will accept, because a movement that arrives by rail and road inland does not produce the same document as one that ends at a quay. A credit that calls for a marine bill of lading covering a delivery to an inland Nepalese place has an internal contradiction in it, and it will be discovered by a bank rather than by a forwarder.

The order to take the decisions in

Because a transit consignment has more moving parts than a coastal import, the sequence matters, and taken in this order no decision invalidates the one before it.

• First, establish the Nepalese delivery town and roughly how high it sits. Everything else follows and nothing can be settled before it.
• Second, choose the crossing that serves that town — Birgunj for the centre and the Kathmandu valley, Bhairahawa for Butwal, Pokhara and the western hills, Biratnagar for the east, Nepalgunj for the mid-west and the Karnali, Kakarbhitta for the far east.
• Third, choose the port from the crossing, not the crossing from the port, and say on the offer which gateway the price is built on.
• Fourth, put the transit questions to a licensed customs broker in Nepal in writing: which routes and stations are nominated, what security the movement requires and who provides it, and what the Nepalese import needs from the seller.
• Fifth, settle the routing, the mode and the operating status with a freight forwarder in writing, including whether the box goes inland or is stripped at the crossing, and what the detention exposure is.
• Sixth, read the tender’s binder clause and establish whether it is written in the viscosity grade system or the penetration system, then settle the ageing evidence before the batch is certified.
• Seventh, choose the packing from the hill leg and the receiving vehicle, then convert tonnage into containers with the arithmetic further down this page and into vehicles with the forwarder.
• Eighth, choose the Incoterms 2020 rule from the mode and name the place precisely, stating which side of the frontier it is on, and settle who bears standing time at the crossing.
• Ninth, write the test schedule into the contract and inspect at loading, with sampling to IS 1201 or ASTM D140, sealed retained samples held by both parties, and a recorded drum count, drum condition and seal number at every handover — of which this route has more than most.

Where Nepalese specification practice comes from

Nepalese road engineering practice sits close to Indian practice. The reasons are structural rather than sentimental: the two networks meet at the frontier, the technical literature, the training and the contracting community overlap heavily, materials and plant move across the same border, and the design lineage that Nepalese standard specifications draw on is the Indian one. In concrete terms, an engineer working on a Nepalese road project is working in a documentary world where the Indian Standards published by the Bureau of Indian Standards, the codes of practice of the Indian Roads Congress and the specification for road and bridge works published by the Indian ministry responsible for road transport and highways are the familiar references, alongside the Nepalese Department of Roads’ own standard specifications and the Nepal Road Standard.

For a supplier the practical consequence is the one that decides how the offer is written: the grade names a Nepalese tender is most likely to use are the IS 73 viscosity grades — VG-10, VG-20, VG-30 and VG-40 — rather than the penetration bands that a Middle East export certificate carries by habit. It is not universal. Older documents, private work, donor-financed projects designed by international consultants and some municipal packages may use penetration designations or something else entirely. But the default assumption for a Nepalese public road tender should be the viscosity system, and an offer that assumes otherwise is answering in the wrong language before anyone has looked at the numbers.

What a viscosity grade actually is, which is not what most exporters think

A penetration grade and a viscosity grade are not two ways of writing the same requirement. They are defined by different properties measured at different temperatures, and the difference is not academic.

• A penetration grade is a closed band at 25 °C. A designation such as 60/70 means the penetration of the material, measured with a standard needle under a 100 g load for 5 s at 25 °C to IS 1203 or ASTM D5, must fall between 60 and 70 tenths of a millimetre. There is a floor and there is a ceiling. It is a consistency measurement made at a temperature far below the one at which a pavement fails in hot weather.
• A viscosity grade is defined by absolute viscosity at 60 °C. The grade name is the point: in the IS 73 system the number in VG-10, VG-20, VG-30 and VG-40 corresponds to the nominal absolute viscosity at 60 °C in hundreds of poise, and each grade is bounded by a viscosity band measured to IS 1206 (Part 2), the analogous method being ASTM D2171. Sixty degrees is not an arbitrary temperature; it approximates a hot pavement, which is where a binder is asked to resist rutting. The system was adopted precisely because it grades the material where the material has to work.
• The penetration line inside a viscosity grade is a minimum, not a band. This is the single most misunderstood feature of the system. IS 73 does specify a minimum penetration at 25 °C for each viscosity grade, but there is no upper bound on it. A grade therefore constrains consistency at service temperature tightly and constrains it at 25 °C only from below.
• There is also a minimum kinematic viscosity at 135 °C, measured to IS 1206 (Part 3), the analogous method being ASTM D2170. That is the mixing and pumping end of the curve, and it is the line that speaks to whether the material will handle sensibly in a plant.

So a viscosity grade specification is, in effect, a specification of the shape of the temperature–consistency curve: bounded at 60 °C where rutting happens, floored at 25 °C to prevent an over-hard material, and floored at 135 °C to keep the mixing behaviour sane. A penetration grade specifies one point on that curve and infers the rest.

The trap, stated once and with the arithmetic

The trap is the habit of treating VG-30 as a synonym for 60/70 and VG-10 as a synonym for 80/100. Those pairings appear in conversation, in trader emails and in cross-reference tables, and they are useful as rough orientation. They are not equivalences and a certificate for one does not evidence the other. The failure runs in both directions and it is worth setting out both, because a supplier will meet both.

• A 60/70 certificate does not evidence VG-30. The defining property of VG-30 is absolute viscosity at 60 °C, and a penetration-grade certificate has not measured it. Penetration at 25 °C does not determine viscosity at 60 °C, because two binders with identical penetration can have materially different temperature susceptibility and therefore different viscosities at service temperature. That is not a theoretical possibility; it is the reason the viscosity system was adopted in the first place. A batch can sit squarely in the 60–70 dmm window and fall outside the VG-30 viscosity band, and nothing on a penetration certificate reveals it.
• A VG-30 certificate does not evidence 60/70 either. Because VG-30’s penetration requirement is a minimum with no ceiling, a compliant VG-30 batch can measure well above 70 dmm and still be a correct VG-30, while failing a literal 60/70 clause outright. It can also measure below 60 dmm — a batch at 50 dmm can satisfy the VG-30 penetration minimum and fail 60/70 at the other end. Either way the substitution fails.
• The ageing evidence differs too, and this is the line that is most often simply missing. IS 73 controls hardening through a viscosity ratio: the absolute viscosity at 60 °C of the residue from the rolling thin film oven test, measured to IS 9382 with the analogous method ASTM D2872, divided by the absolute viscosity at 60 °C of the original material, with a maximum of 4.0. That single line requires absolute viscosity at 60 °C to be measured twice, before and after ageing. A Middle East export certificate written in the ASTM penetration idiom typically carries loss on heating and drop in penetration from a thin film oven test to ASTM D1754 instead. Those are different exposures measuring a different thing, and no arithmetic converts one into the other. A certificate without absolute viscosity on it cannot evidence a viscosity grade, before or after ageing, and the gap is not closable after the cargo has sailed.
• The ductility convention differs. In the IS 73 system ductility is specified on the residue after the rolling thin film oven test, measured to IS 1208, the analogous method being ASTM D113. The ASTM penetration-grade convention reports ductility on the original material. A certificate showing a ductility figure with no indication of whether it was run on the original or on the aged residue does not answer an IS 73 clause, and a figure on the original does not answer a requirement on the residue.

What to do about it, in the order that works

• Quote in the same words the tender uses. If the clause says VG-30, the offer says VG-30. Do not silently offer a penetration grade against a viscosity clause, and do not let a data sheet do it on your behalf.
• Schedule the absolute viscosity tests before the batch is certified. Absolute viscosity at 60 °C on the original and on the rolling thin film oven residue, plus kinematic viscosity at 135 °C, have to be run and printed. Adding them afterwards is not possible in any useful sense, because the certificate has to describe the material that was loaded.
• Print the method designation beside every result. Where the tender is written in the Indian idiom, print the IS designation; where the certificate is produced in an ASTM laboratory, print both. A number without a method is a number a destination laboratory cannot reproduce.
• Where a cross-reference is unavoidable, get it in writing from the engineer before dispatch. A cross-reference table is a basis for a conversation with the engineer. It is never a defence at delivery, and on this route the delivery is at the far end of a foreign transit leg and a mountain road.

The bodies to know, described by what they do

Five institutions are worth a buyer or a supplier being able to name, and they are named here as public bodies rather than as counterparties. None is a counterparty of ours and no relationship with any of them is claimed or implied.

• The Nepal Bureau of Standards and Metrology is the national standards body, sitting under the ministry responsible for industry, commerce and supplies. Its functions are the ordinary functions of a national standards body: developing and publishing Nepal Standards, operating a national certification mark scheme, acting as the national metrology authority and carrying responsibilities in relation to conformity assessment for goods placed on the market. It is the body a Nepalese tender means when it refers to a national standard.
• The Department of Roads, under the ministry responsible for physical infrastructure and transport, is the central roads authority for the strategic network. Its standard specifications for road works and its design and construction guidance are the documents from which most Nepalese binder clauses on strategic road projects descend, and its central and regional laboratories are the sort of facility at which a consignment may be verified at destination.
• A separate central body carries responsibility for local infrastructure and local roads, and since federalisation Nepal’s provincial and local governments also procure road works in their own right. The practical consequence is the ordinary one: there is no single Nepalese procurement practice to quote against, and packages from different authorities can carry different clauses.
• Public procurement is governed by a national public procurement framework administered by a dedicated monitoring office, which is why a Nepalese tender arrives as a structured dossier with technical and administrative clause books rather than as a purchase enquiry.
• On the Indian side, the Bureau of Indian Standards is the national standards body that publishes IS 73 and the IS test methods cited throughout this page, and the Indian Roads Congress publishes the codes of practice that much of the design guidance in the region descends from. They matter to a Nepalese shipment twice over: their documents are the technical references a Nepalese clause is likely to cite, and India is the territory the goods physically cross.

This page quotes no Nepalese national standard designation for paving bitumen. The reason is the same as on every market page here. Procurement runs through a central roads department, a local infrastructure body, provincial and local governments and donor-financed projects designed by international consultants, and their documents are not uniform enough to be reduced to one reference. A number quoted from memory into a compliance box on an offer form is a false compliance claim sitting inside a contract, and an invented national standard number is the worst thing a supplier page can print, because it is precise enough for a buyer to rely on and wrong often enough to ruin a shipment. If an enquiry form asks which Nepalese standard the cargo complies with, the honest answer is that the binding requirement is the one the tender document incorporates, and that you will quote against that clause once you have seen it. Ask for the clause. It is a normal request and a serious buyer will send it.

The edition question, which is real here

IS 73 has been revised more than once, and the change from a penetration-based to a viscosity-based grading system is itself the product of a revision. That has two consequences on this market. First, a clause citing IS 73 without an edition is incomplete, because the grade names and the acceptance limits are not identical across editions. Second, older Nepalese documents may still be written in penetration designations inherited from the earlier practice, so a supplier will genuinely meet both systems in the same market and occasionally in the same tender dossier. The response is not to guess which is intended. It is to ask, in writing, which edition of which standard the clause incorporates, and to take the acceptance limits from that text rather than from a data sheet or from memory. The same discipline applies to the modified binder and emulsion standards described below, which have also been revised.

Modified binder, emulsion and cutback in the Indian idiom

These are not exotic corners of a Nepalese catalogue. A country of hill roads, surface-dressed rural network and heavy monsoon patching uses spray-applied products in quantity, and the designation grammar for them is Indian rather than ASTM or European.

• Polymer modified bitumen in Indian practice is specified under IS 15462. The designation convention in that standard has changed between editions, so the edition the clause cites governs the grade names as well as the limits. The correct response to a clause that says only PMB is to ask which standard, which edition and which grade, and to require the elastic recovery and storage stability evidence that a modified binder specification exists to control rather than accepting the word polymer on a data sheet. Note also the transit consequence: modified binder in bulk wants controlled heating and agitation to stay homogeneous, which is a poor fit for a tanker standing at a land customs station, so on this route modification argues strongly for drums.
• Bitumen emulsion in Indian practice is specified under IS 8887, with the cationic families designated by breaking behaviour in the rapid, medium and slow setting convention. Two physical cautions for Nepal specifically: an emulsion has a finite storage life and dislikes both heat and prolonged standing, so a consignment that spends weeks on a sea leg, a transit leg and a hill road is exposed to exactly the conditions that break it; and emulsion is the product most likely to be wanted for monsoon and post-monsoon patching, which is the period when the road to the site is least reliable. Where the leg is long, plan the shelf life explicitly and in writing.
• Cutback bitumen in Indian practice is specified under IS 217. A cutback carries solvent, and its flash point and handling regime are nothing like a paving grade’s, which matters in an open storage yard in a hot Terai pre-monsoon May.

The band is not a point, and here the point is a curve

Two cargoes can both be genuine VG-30 and behave differently on a Nepalese pavement. One sits near the bottom of the viscosity band with a comparatively high penetration; the other sits near the top with a lower one. Both are in grade and both pass a conformity check. On a heavily loaded Terai highway approach or a channelised Kathmandu junction they are not the same material. The practical responses, in order of usefulness: require the measured values on a batch-specific Certificate of Analysis rather than a sheet that reprints the grade limits; agree a narrower contractual window in writing for the shipment, which leaves the grade name and the tender satisfied while giving you a contractual right to the material you actually need; and read absolute viscosity at 60 °C and softening point as hard as you read penetration, because those are the lines that speak to behaviour at service temperature and they are the lines most often skimmed on an export offer.

The transit route adds a second reason to insist. A rejected parcel at an Indian port is a cargo sitting in a foreign country under a transit procedure with a security instrument live behind it. A rejected parcel that has crossed the frontier, been cleared into Nepal, been hauled up a hill road and discharged at a site is a problem with no realistic reverse gear at all. The inspection you did not pay for at the loading point is the argument you cannot win afterwards.

Adulteration, solubility and the discipline of the handover

A Nepalese consignment changes hands more often than almost any other bitumen movement on this site: loading point, vessel, Indian port, transit vehicle or wagon, inland depot at the crossing, stripping, Nepalese vehicle, and a final hill haul that may involve a further transfer to a smaller truck. Each of those is a place where quantity, condition or composition can be argued about. The technical defence is unglamorous and effective. Solubility is the line that shows whether the material is bitumen or bitumen extended with mineral matter; ask for it to IS 1216 or ASTM D2042 with the solvent stated, and if a certificate omits solubility altogether treat that as a finding rather than an oversight. Appoint an internationally recognised inspection company to attend loading, sample across the consignment to IS 1201 or ASTM D140, and seal retained samples held by both parties. Then carry that discipline across the frontier: record drum count, drum condition and seal numbers at every handover, because a recorded count is what closes a quantity argument before it opens, and on this route there are more handovers to record than on any coastal delivery.

Five questions to ask about any Nepalese binder clause

• Is this a viscosity grade or a penetration grade? Settle it before anything else, because it decides which properties have to be measured and therefore what the laboratory has to do before the batch is certified.
• Which standard and which edition does the clause incorporate? The grade names and the acceptance limits both live in the cited text, not in the grade name and not in a data sheet.
• Which ageing procedure is controlled, and is absolute viscosity required on the residue? If the clause controls a viscosity ratio, a thin film oven loss-on-heating line does not answer it and the test has to be scheduled in advance.
• Does the site need a low-temperature property, and does the cited standard have one? For a high mountain project the honest answer is that a viscosity grade has no low-temperature line, so if one is needed it has to be specified and evidenced separately.
• Are spray-applied products in the same package? Emulsion under IS 8887 and cutback under IS 217 are separate products with their own acceptance tables, and a paving-grade certificate evidences nothing at all for them.

What a usable Certificate of Analysis looks like for this market

• Batch or lot identification tying the certificate to the drums actually loaded, not a typical-values sheet reissued for every consignment.
• Absolute viscosity at 60 °C as a measured value, with the method designation printed beside it. Without this line a viscosity grade is not evidenced, whatever else the certificate says.
• Absolute viscosity at 60 °C on the rolling thin film oven residue, and the ratio calculated, where the clause controls hardening that way.
• Kinematic viscosity at 135 °C, penetration at 25 °C and softening point as measured values, each read against any narrower contractual window agreed for the shipment.
• Ductility with the condition stated — original or aged residue — because the two conventions differ between the systems and a bare figure answers neither reliably.
• Solubility with the solvent and the designation stated, and flash point with the method stated.
• Where a modified binder is supplied, the standard, the edition and the grade actually met, with the elastic recovery and storage stability evidence, rather than the word polymer.
• Nothing about adhesion or water sensitivity. Those are mix-level questions answered with the project aggregate, and no binder certificate can carry them — which matters here because in the wet Nepalese hill belt they are the governing durability questions.

The season is shorter than the calendar, and it is shorter still in the hills

Nepal’s construction year is bounded at both ends. The south-west monsoon conventionally arrives in the east around the second week of June and withdraws around late September or early October, later in the east than in the far west, and the great majority of the year’s precipitation — commonly cited at around eighty per cent nationally — falls inside that window. Asphalt work is effectively suspended across most of the country for the duration. That leaves a working year in two pieces: a long post-monsoon and winter period from roughly October to May in the Terai, and a much shorter usable window in the hills and mountains where winter takes a further bite out of the cold end.

Three planning consequences follow, and they shape the commercial conversation more than any technical point on this page.

• Demand concentrates. Everybody is working in the same months, which means plant, haulage, labour and material are all under simultaneous pressure in the same weeks. A buyer who orders when the window opens is ordering at the same moment as every other buyer in the country.
• Material has to be pre-positioned rather than called off. The normal pattern on a Nepalese hill or mountain project is to move quantity to the site or to a nearby depot while the road allows, and draw it down through the season. That makes storage behaviour, drum integrity and the ability to heat one unit at a time far more valuable than a saving on packaging.
• A consignment that misses a window waits for the next one. This is different from arriving late. A cargo that reaches the frontier as the monsoon breaks is a cargo that will sit somewhere until the season reopens, and where it sits, under what cover, and at whose cost is a question to settle in the contract rather than in an argument.

There is a further timing feature of this market that no purely climatic account captures. Nepal’s official year runs on the Bikram Sambat calendar, and the government fiscal year runs from mid-July to mid-July, so the fiscal year end falls at the close of Ashadh, in mid-July — which is a month into the monsoon. Public spending, contract completion and payment deadlines therefore concentrate into the weeks when the weather is worst and the roads are least reliable. A supplier who does not know this reads the resulting rush as unreasonable rather than as structural. A supplier who does know it plans deliveries to arrive well before it. The calendar point has a documentary edge too: dates on Nepalese official documents may be expressed in Bikram Sambat rather than in the Gregorian calendar, and a contract or a credit that does not say which calendar governs a date has an ambiguity in it. Fix it in writing.

The landslide season, described as what it is

The hill belt of Nepal is young, steep and tectonically active, and the road alignments that connect the Terai to the hills are cut into slopes of exactly that character. When those slopes are saturated, which is during and immediately after the heaviest monsoon rainfall, slope failure risk on hill alignments is at its highest. That is a description of terrain and season, and this page states it as such. It is not a statement about the condition, availability or safety of any road on any date, and no supplier page is in a position to make one.

The planning response is the same one the season already dictates and it does not require any operational claim to justify it: move material to hill destinations outside the saturated months, pre-position rather than call off, treat any monsoon-period hill delivery schedule as provisional, and get current routing advice from a freight forwarder in writing and dated. Where a delivery term commits a seller to a hill destination during the monsoon, the risk allocation for delay caused by route conditions should be written into the contract rather than left to be argued afterwards.

How many times the cargo is handled, which is the packing argument in one line

Count the handling events on a Nepalese consignment and the packing decision makes itself. Loading at origin. Loading to the vessel. Discharge at the Indian port. Loading to a transit vehicle or wagon. Movement across a foreign country under a customs procedure. Arrival at the crossing and presentation at a land customs station. Clearance into Nepal. Stripping at an inland clearance depot. Loading to a Nepalese vehicle. The Terai leg. Frequently a transfer to a smaller vehicle for the hill leg. Delivery to a site that may have no mechanical handling at all.

That is more handovers than almost any other movement described on this site, and each one is a place where a count can be disputed, a package can be damaged and a seal can be broken. A packing format that fails locally is worth a great deal on a route like this, and a format that fails globally is a catastrophe with no reverse gear. That is the whole argument for drums, and everything below is detail on it.

Drums against bulk, decided by the route rather than by preference

• Bulk requires heated storage at the destination. A heated road tanker is only useful if the receiver has tankage of adequate capacity, a compatible discharge connection, a pump and the ability to take the whole load promptly. A contractor running a plant on a hill road project above Butwal or beyond Surkhet has none of that, and no freight quotation changes it.
• A tanker holds temperature badly across a long leg with a frontier on it. Time standing at a land customs station is time cooling, and a transit movement is a procedure with steps in it rather than a continuous run. Reheating a load that has stiffened is an operational problem with a cost and a risk attached, not a delay.
• Bulk sits badly with a transit procedure. A movement running under customs security to a nominated station is not one in which product can conveniently be split between two receivers or partly discharged en route, because the mechanism rests on the goods that arrive being demonstrably the goods that entered. That is structural, not administrative.
• The hill road sets the vehicle, and a tanker cannot be made smaller. This is the Nepal-specific point that does not arise on a plains corridor. Drums can be transferred to whatever vehicle the last climb accepts, in whatever quantity that vehicle takes, as many times as the road requires. A bulk load is one indivisible unit that either fits the whole route or does not.
• A drum fails locally. A damaged drum costs one drum out of eighty. A compromised bulk load costs the consignment, in a country the seller cannot easily reach, at the end of a transit procedure.
• Drums allow staged call-off and covered storage. On a project fed through a season bounded by monsoon at one end and winter at the other, the ability to take material in the quantity the site can use, store the rest under cover and heat it one unit at a time is worth more than the packaging saving.

Where bulk does deserve a hearing is in the Terai, at a fixed plant with permanent heated tankage, close to a crossing, outside the monsoon. That is the honest boundary and it is a narrow one: a short plains leg to an equipped plant argues for bulk; a transit movement to a hill site argues for drums, and nothing in between changes the logic.

The packing arithmetic, and then the vehicle

Site standard loading figures, which apply to the sea leg and to any container movement inland, are as follows. New steel drums of 150 kg net give 80 drums and 12 MT per 20 ft FCL. Drums of 180 kg net give 80 drums and 14.4 MT. Drums of 185 kg net give 80 drums and 14.8 MT. Jumbo or poly bags of 1 MT give 20 bags and 20 MT. The 20 ft box is the unit because a cargo of this density reaches its weight limit long before it fills a larger container.

Use these figures to fix the drum count, the packing cost per tonne and the number of packages on the transport document. Then convert tonnage into vehicles with the forwarder rather than with a calculator, because on this route the conversion happens at least twice — once for the Indian transit leg and again for the Nepalese leg, which may itself split at the foot of the hills. No payload figure appears anywhere on this page. What a specific vehicle and trailer combination may lawfully carry on a specific alignment in either country is a matter for the carrier through the forwarder, and the practical limit on a Nepalese hill road is frequently geometric rather than legal.

Jumbo bags, and where they fit here

The 1 MT poly bag is efficient on paper: 20 MT in a 20 ft box against 14.8 MT in drums at 185 kg, which is a real difference in freight per tonne. It fits this market least well at exactly the point where the freight saving would matter most. A 1 MT bag needs mechanical handling at every point it is moved, and the handling chain on this route ends at sites that frequently have none. It also has to be melted as a unit rather than drawn down, which is the opposite of what a staged call-off through a compressed season wants. Where the destination is a fixed Terai plant with handling equipment and a melting arrangement suited to bags, they are worth pricing. Where the destination is up a hill road, the 180 or 185 kg drum is the practical unit and the freight difference is the price of getting the material to the site at all.

Two physical points about drums that are specific to a monsoon country

First, specify new steel drums in the contract, in words rather than by implication. Reconditioned drums are the most common source of contamination disputes in this trade anywhere, and a cargo that changes hands at a port, a transit vehicle, a frontier, a stripping yard and a hill transfer gives that argument five places to start. On a viscosity-graded market the argument is harder to close after the fact, because a destination laboratory testing absolute viscosity on a suspect sample is testing a property the buyer may never have had an original measurement of unless the certificate carried one.

Second, and this is the point most often left off a packing specification for a monsoon destination: drums are filled hot and the block shrinks as it cools, leaving a shallow depression in the top head. In a Nepalese monsoon that depression collects rainwater. A drum with water sitting on the block that is charged into a melter produces violent foaming and boil-over when the water flashes to steam under a layer of hot bitumen. That is a safety point rather than a quality point, and it applies with full force to a market where material is routinely pre-positioned and stored through or immediately after the wet season. Covered storage, drums stored on dunnage rather than on wet ground, closures checked before storage and heads cleared before charging are the ordinary precautions, and they should be written into the delivery instructions rather than assumed.

One regulatory line to settle before a tanker is booked

Where bitumen is offered for carriage at or above 100 °C it may fall to be classified as UN 3257, elevated temperature liquid, n.o.s., Class 9 under the UN model regulations, while packed bitumen moving at ambient temperature is treated differently. Whether that applies to your movement, and what marking, documentation, equipment and driver qualification follow from it in each country on the route, is a question for the carrier and the forwarder. On this route the phrase each country is doing real work: a movement that crosses a frontier is a movement subject to two national implementations of the transport rules, and a classification question answered for one leg has not been answered for the other.

Who the standards body is, and what it does

Nepal’s national standards body is the Nepal Bureau of Standards and Metrology, sitting under the ministry responsible for industry, commerce and supplies. Its functions are the ordinary functions of a national standards body: it develops and publishes Nepal Standards, it operates a national certification mark scheme under which a manufacturer may be licensed to apply the mark to a product, it acts as the national metrology authority, and it carries responsibilities in relation to conformity assessment for goods placed on the Nepalese market. It is the body a Nepalese tender means when it refers to a national standard, and it is a public body rather than a counterparty of ours; nothing in this section describes a relationship with it or with any other authority named on this page.

The conformity mechanism, described as a mechanism

Schemes of this family work in a broadly consistent way wherever they appear, and understanding the shape of one is more useful than a claim about its current content. The common structure is this:

• The trigger is scope. A scheme applies to a defined list of products, usually expressed by product category and by tariff classification. Whether a given product is inside or outside that list at a given moment is the whole question, and it is the question this page will not answer.
• The obligation may attach to the manufacturer, the importer or both. Certification mark schemes typically license a manufacturer against a standard and a quality system; import-side schemes typically require the importer to produce evidence at entry. Which applies determines who has to act and when, and it is frequently the exporter rather than the importer who has to move first.
• The evidence is a test report against a named standard, and the standard matters. A scheme verifies against a specified requirement table, and on this market that table is likely to be written in the Indian idiom with IS test methods. Test reports produced only against ASTM methods may not answer it, and reports missing absolute viscosity certainly will not answer a viscosity-graded requirement. Establish which standard any verification will run against at the same moment you establish whether verification applies at all.
• Marking and labelling can be part of it. Where a scheme requires a mark, a declaration or particular label content, that is a physical obligation settled before packing rather than after, and a drum already filled and stencilled is an expensive place to discover it.
• The consequence of getting it wrong is not a warning letter. Where evidence is required and absent, the usual outcomes are detention of the goods, inspection and testing at the importer’s cost and time, penalties, or refusal of entry. On this route that penalty lands on a cargo that has already completed an ocean voyage and a transit movement across a foreign country, in a place where reversing the movement is not a practical option.

Why this page does not tell you whether bitumen is in scope

Because the scope of schemes of this kind changes. Product lists are amended, tariff lines are added and removed, appointed bodies are re-tendered and replaced, and available routes are revised. An undated page asserting that a product is or is not currently in scope, or naming a currently appointed inspection agent, is worse than useless: it is a statement precise enough for a buyer to plan a shipment on and wrong often enough to ruin one. So this page names no current scope and no appointed agent.

Put these questions in writing to a licensed customs broker in Nepal before you contract, and put them again if the shipment slips:

• Is this product, under this description and this tariff classification, subject to any certification, conformity, quality-control or import-permit requirement in Nepal on my intended shipment date?
• If it is, what has to be produced, by whom, against which standard and which edition, and at what point in the shipment sequence?
• What evidence will the customs office at the crossing I am actually using expect, and does that answer change with the crossing?
• Is any laboratory verification carried out at destination, against which methods, and what happens to the cargo while it is pending?

The question that only a transit country raises, and which almost nobody asks

Here is the point that distinguishes a Nepalese shipment from every coastal one described on this site. The goods cross India, and India has its own standards, certification and import-control machinery. The Bureau of Indian Standards is the Indian national standards body, and India operates product certification and quality-control mechanisms of its own. A cargo entered for home consumption in India would fall to be considered against whatever of that machinery applies to it.

Goods moving under a customs transit procedure are, by the nature of the procedure, not entered for home consumption in the transit country. Whether that means no Indian requirement attaches to them, and whether any documentary, marking or handling requirement nonetheless applies to goods in transit as distinct from goods imported, is a question for a licensed customs broker and not a question this page answers. It is raised here because it is real, because it is specific to a landlocked destination, and because it is the question that is systematically omitted from generic supplier pages and from most enquiry checklists. Ask it explicitly, in these terms, of a broker on the Indian side as well as one in Nepal, and get the answer in writing and dated. Discovering it at a port with a transit security instrument live behind the movement is the expensive way to find out.

Customs on the Nepalese side

Nepal’s customs administration sits under the ministry responsible for finance and operates customs offices at the border crossings and at the inland clearance depots. Declarations are lodged electronically through a customs system of the UNCTAD ASYCUDA family, and the import declaration is known locally as the pragyapan patra. Importers are ordinarily required to hold the registrations the customs and central bank framework specifies, which commonly include tax registration and an export–import code; which registrations a particular buyer needs, and what evidence the seller must provide to support them, is a broker question.

Two structural points matter to a seller. The first is that the file is opened before the goods arrive, which means the importer needs the commercial documents from the seller earlier than a first-time exporter expects, and on this route earlier still, because the transit declaration on the Indian side draws on the same documents at a still earlier point. Late or inconsistent seller documentation does not merely delay a clearance; it can stop the transit movement from being lodged at all, in a country where neither party is standing. The second is that petroleum bitumen falls under HS heading 2713.20, and the full national subheading and any duty, levy, tax or excise treatment must be confirmed with a licensed customs broker in Nepal. No rates of any kind are stated on this page.

Payment, foreign exchange and the credit

Import payment in Nepal is regulated through the framework administered by the central bank, and a documentary credit is the ordinary instrument for a cargo of this character. Three cautions, each of which has caught a Nepalese shipment.

• Draft the credit against the documents the movement will actually generate. A movement that ends at an inland place in Nepal does not generate the same transport document as a movement that ends at a quay, and a credit calling for a marine bill of lading covering delivery to Birgunj has a contradiction inside it that a bank will find.
• Do not call for a document that only exists in the destination as a condition of a payment made before arrival. This is a common and avoidable structural error and it locks a seller out of payment for reasons neither party intended.
• Fix the goods description once and never let it drift. The description must be word for word identical across the contract, the credit, the invoice, the packing list, the transport document, the certificate of origin, the certificate of analysis and every customs declaration on both sides of the frontier. A description that changes between documents is the commonest self-inflicted cause of a hold anywhere in the world, and on this route it is also the slowest and most expensive to correct.

Insurance, and the one question the transit leg adds

The insurance argument is set out in the transit section above and is not repeated here. What belongs in a customs and documents section is the single question the frontier adds to it: the policy has to be capable of responding in both customs territories, and a claim arising on the Indian leg arises while the goods are under a transit procedure that neither the Nepalese buyer nor the seller controls. Establish before the cover is placed who has insurable interest at each stage of that movement, who can present a claim in the transit country, and whether the certificate of insurance the credit calls for names a place beyond the port. A policy expressed to a port is a policy expressed to the wrong end of the journey on this route.

Other authorities and requirements a buyer may encounter

Petroleum products in Nepal sit within a supply and regulatory framework administered through the ministry responsible for industry, commerce and supplies and the bodies under it, and environmental and workplace controls on the storage and handling of hot petroleum products may attach to a terminal, a depot or a plant. Whether any licensing, permitting, registration or notification obligation attaches to the import, storage or handling of bitumen as a petroleum product in Nepal, and to whom it attaches, is a question for a Nepalese legal adviser and a licensed customs broker. This page states no position on it, and nothing here is legal, customs, regulatory, insurance or compliance advice.

Language, calendar and the small things that cause real disputes

• Nepali is the official language and English is widely used in technical and commercial work. Where a tender or a contract exists in two versions, establish in writing which version governs in the event of a discrepancy, because a translated specification that softens or hardens a limit is a contractual problem waiting to surface.
• Dates may be expressed in the Bikram Sambat calendar. Official documents, contract milestones and fiscal deadlines commonly run on it, and the Nepalese fiscal year runs mid-July to mid-July rather than on a Gregorian year. A date on a document without a stated calendar is an ambiguity, and in a credit or a delivery schedule it is an expensive one. State the calendar.
• Units and conventions. Print units beside every value on a certificate, print the test method designation beside every result, and where a value could be read in more than one convention write it in a way that cannot be. This matters more on a viscosity-graded market than on a penetration one, because absolute viscosity in poise and dynamic viscosity in pascal seconds are related by a factor and a certificate that omits the unit is a certificate that will be misread.

What to give a Nepalese buyer at enquiry stage

A serious offer into this market answers questions the buyer has not yet asked, and there are five that recur. State which gateway and which crossing the price is built on. State which side of the frontier the named place in the delivery term sits on. State which standard and which edition the material is certified to, and confirm that absolute viscosity at 60 °C will appear as a measured value on the batch certificate. State whether the box goes inland or is stripped at the crossing, because that decides the buyer’s detention exposure. And state plainly what the offer does not cover — the conformity position, the transit arrangements and the operating status of any route — and point the buyer to the parties accountable for those answers. An offer that does this is easier to compare, and on a route with this many moving parts, easier to compare is the whole competitive advantage.