BIS Is Now Mandatory for Cement and Fertilizer Sacks in India: IS 11652 and IS 9755

A Quality Control Order put HDPE/PP woven sacks for 50 kg cement under mandatory BIS certification. What cement and fertilizer buyers must now verify.

For most of the history of this industry, an Indian buyer of woven sacks could treat Indian Standards as a specification reference rather than a licensing requirement. For two applications that is no longer true, and the change is recent enough that a good deal of the market is still catching up. Cement sacks and fertilizer sacks now sit under mandatory certification, which means the question a buyer has to ask a supplier is no longer whether the bag is made to the standard but whether the manufacturer holds a licence to mark it. Those are very different questions, and only one of them has a verifiable answer.

Cement sacks: IS 11652, and the Quality Control Order behind it

The Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers issued a Quality Control Second Amendment Order, 2025 covering textiles in the form of high-density polyethylene and polypropylene woven sacks for the packaging of 50 kg cement, and it came into force on 6 January 2026. Products in that category must conform to Indian Standard IS 11652:2017. A Quality Control Order is the instrument that converts an Indian Standard from a voluntary specification into a mandatory one, and once it applies, manufacture and sale within India require BIS certification with the corresponding ISI mark. The commercial consequence is straightforward: an uncertified sack in that category is not a cheaper option, it is an unsaleable one.

That is a meaningful change for cement companies and for the converters who supply them, because the compliance question moves upstream into supplier selection. A cement producer's own risk is not only that a bag fails on the filling line but that its packaging is non-compliant at the point of sale, and the only practical defence is documentary: hold the supplier's licence details on file and check that they cover the exact specification, capacity and product being supplied rather than something adjacent.

Fertilizer sacks: IS 9755, including the neem-coated urea distinction

The fertilizer side is governed by IS 9755:2021, which prescribes requirements for HDPE and PP woven sacks of 45 kg capacity for packaging neem-coated urea and 50 kg capacity for fertilizers other than neem-coated urea. BIS certification against IS 9755 is mandatory for manufacturers, and that obligation extends to foreign manufacturers as well as Indian ones, which matters if any part of your supply chain sits outside India. The capacity distinction inside the standard is worth reading carefully rather than skimming, because 45 kg and 50 kg are treated as separate cases and a licence covering one does not automatically speak to the other.

How to verify, and what a licence actually covers

A BIS licence is granted for a defined scope. It names the manufacturer, the manufacturing location, the Indian Standard, and the product varieties or capacities within that standard which the licence permits. Each element is a place where a mismatch can hide. A licence held for one plant does not cover production at another. A licence against one capacity within IS 9755 does not cover the other. And a licence issued against an earlier revision of a standard is not the same as one against the current revision, which is why the year matters when a standard is cited: IS 11652:2017 and IS 9755:2021 are specific revisions rather than shorthand for a family.

For anything outside those two mandatory categories, Indian Standards remain what they were: useful, technically sound specification references that a buyer and supplier can agree to work to without a licensing requirement attaching. Food-contact packaging is the other area where Indian regulation bites, through the Food Safety and Standards packaging regulations rather than through a Quality Control Order, and that regime works on material conformity and migration limits rather than on a mark. A bag for rice or sugar is therefore a different compliance conversation from a bag for cement, and conflating the two is a common source of confusion.

What this does to price, and why that is not a bad thing

Mandatory certification raises the floor on cost in the affected categories, because licensing, testing and surveillance are real expenses and because it removes the cheapest tier of supply from the market. Buyers who have been benchmarking against that tier will see quoted prices rise and should not read the increase as opportunism. The compensating benefit is that the specification becomes enforceable: GSM, dimensions, strength and stitching are defined by the standard rather than negotiated per order, which reduces the incidence of the failure that costs a cement or fertilizer plant most, a bag that bursts on a filling line running at speed.

Cement, 50 kg

IS 11652:2017; mandatory under a QCO in force from 6 January 2026

Fertilizer

IS 9755:2021; 45 kg for neem-coated urea, 50 kg for others

Applies to

Indian and foreign manufacturers alike

Verify

Licence scope: manufacturer, plant, standard revision and capacity

Do not conflate

Food-contact compliance runs through FSS packaging regulations, not a QCO

Expect

A higher price floor in the mandatory categories, and an enforceable specification

It is worth being precise about which of your lines these orders actually touch, because they do not touch all of them. A 50 kg cement sack and a laminated fertilizer sack sit inside the mandatory categories. An animal feed sack, a printed rice bag and a laminated sugar sack are not covered by these particular orders, and are governed instead through the food-contact route under the Food Safety and Standards packaging regulations. A buyer with a mixed basket is therefore running two compliance conversations at once, and conflating them is what produces a request for an ISI mark on a product no order applies to.