The Warehousing Development and Regulatory Authority (WDRA), India’s decade-old regulator for the sector, is working on norms for non-agricultural commodities. So long, the authority was regulating warehouses storing agricultural commodities.

The requirements for warehouses and the applicable norms differ for agricultural and non-agricultural commodities. The move is significant because institutional investors are not comfortable dealing with unregulated entities.

In order to develop a regulated warehousing ecosystem for non-agriculture commodities, the Government of India set up a Working Group in May 2019.

The Working Group was to recommend relevant standards for warehousing of non-agricultural commodities considering the current practices followed in the industry and global best practices, for implementation in the warehouses to be registered by WDRA

Accordingly, the Working Group after evaluating various policy documents and guidelines/literature publicly available about warehousing/storage, assaying of non-agricultural commodities, has now prepared a Report with recommendations for development of regulated warehousing ecosystem for non-agricultural commodities under the following heads:

1. Legislative aspects
2. Capacity enhancement at WDRA – human resource and technological
3. Storage infrastructure
4. Quality standards
5. eNWRs
6. Warehousing procedures – KYC and KYD, deposit checks, weighing, assaying, stacking, eNWR issuance, delivery checks
7. Risk Management
8. Global best practices
9. Timelines for Implementation

The following is the list of identified commodities under the Report:

Source: Department of Economic Affairs

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