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Almost every enquiry we receive names a grade. Technical, LR, AR, pure, extra pure, food grade, IP. Very few of those words mean anything on their own, and the two or three that do mean something mean it only in a document that the enquiry does not name. This is a guide to which is which.
This is a buyer’s reading guide to grade nomenclature, not legal advice and not a specification. Velora Chemicals is a bulk supplier and trader sourcing from qualified manufacturers, not a manufacturer. Nothing here states or implies that Velora holds any licence or registration. Every standard named below should be bought and read before any of its numbers goes into a purchase order.
A grade name is a contractual description, and the law will hold a seller to the description it gave. What it will not do is supply a meaning the parties never agreed. So the question to ask of any grade name is not what it suggests, but which document defines it — and whether that document is named in your contract.
For a surprising proportion of the grade names in daily use in the Indian chemical trade, the honest answer is that no document defines them. That is not a scandal; it is how trade language works. It becomes a problem only at the point where somebody expects the word to do the work of a specification.
There are four distinct sources, and they carry completely different weight. In descending order of what they oblige:
The Bureau of Indian Standards does define grade names — but it does so separately in each product standard, and there is no master BIS grade ladder. We looked for one and did not find one. What there is, is a grade clause in each specification, setting out that standard’s own grades and pinning each to a table.
That produces the single most useful fact in this article. Three Indian Standards use the word “technical”, and each pins it to its own table, written for its own product.
| Standard (edition read) | What its grade clause says | What “technical” is pinned to |
|---|---|---|
| IS 252 : 1991, Caustic Soda, Pure and Technical | Two grades: Pure, described as suitable for rayon and cosmetic industries; Technical, described as suitable for textile, soap, vegetable oil refining, paper and other industries | NaOH 95.00% min on a dry basis (Pure is 99.50% min) |
| IS 265 : 1993, Hydrochloric Acid | Four grades: Technical, Chemical pure, Analytical reagent, Boiler water | Total acidity as HCl 30.0% min (Chemical pure and Analytical reagent are 32.0% min) |
| IS 251 : 1998, Soda Ash, Technical | The whole standard is the technical product; three grades inside it, by bulk density | Total alkalinity as sodium carbonate 98.5% min, the same for all three grades |
95%, 30% and 98.5%. The three figures are not on a comparable base, and that is the first thing to notice about them: hydrochloric acid is specified as an aqueous solution at the strengths at which it is commercially traded, while caustic soda is specified on a dry basis. Which is exactly the point. The number behind “technical” is set by the product, by the basis the standard measures it on, and by the committee that wrote that standard, and it transfers to nothing else. So a quotation that says “technical grade” and names no standard has not specified a purity, a strength or an impurity ceiling — there is no general meaning for it to fall back on.
Note also what IS 252 : 1991 does in its grade clause: it defines its two grades by intended industry, in words, and only then pins them to a table. That is worth knowing, but it is worth being precise about what it does. The standard names the intended industries in words and then fixes conformity by the table. The words tell you who the grade was written for; the 95.00% minimum is what a seller is actually held to. Material failing the table is not Technical grade because it happens to be going to a soap maker.
A caution that applies to every Indian Standard quoted in this article. The only full texts we could read are superseded editions, and a later revision exists for every one of them — IS 252 : 1991, IS 265 : 1993, IS 266 : 1993, IS 251 : 1998 and IS 1070 : 1992 have all been revised since. We read none of those later editions, so we do not say that any structure or figure below survives into them. Treat what follows as showing the shape of a BIS grade clause rather than as current values. The IS 252 title itself changed between editions, from Caustic Soda, Pure and Technical to Caustic soda — Specification, which is a direct warning that grade structures move between revisions.
LR, laboratory reagent. GR, guaranteed reagent. Extra pure. Pure. Commercial. Industrial. We searched for a standards body, a statute or a published specification that defines any of these as a grade term, and found none. Every source describing them was a supplier catalogue, a supplier FAQ or an explainer article. That is our search result rather than a proof that none exists — but the practical conclusion is the same either way: if you cannot find the document, you cannot cite it in a contract.
This is not a dark secret. One major international laboratory-chemicals supplier publishes its own grade definitions openly, on a product-grades page of its own website, and is frank about what they are: a set of assay bands assigned from that company’s own batch results, by that company’s own methods. On that page, “Tech. 90%” is defined as greater than 88.0% and “Tech. 85%” as greater than 83.0% — and the same page reserves the right to move a product between grades depending on inventory.
Read that twice, because it is the whole argument of this article in one example. A supplier grade is a label the supplier attaches to material it has already tested, and it can be reattached. It is a useful shorthand for a catalogue. It is not a specification, and it was never claimed to be one.
The same logic applies to the branded premium lines — the ones with a registered trade mark after the name. The brand belongs to the manufacturer. What has external meaning is the specification printed alongside it, where one is printed. Contract on the specification, not on the brand.
“AR” sits apart from LR and GR, and buyers who lump the three together get this wrong. In India, AR is a grade the Bureau of Indian Standards actually defines — in two ways. It appears as a named grade inside product standards: Analytical reagent is one of the four grades in IS 265 and one of the four in IS 266. And BIS publishes standalone analytical reagent specifications for individual substances; IS 376, for sodium hydroxide analytical reagent, is current in a 2023 edition.
Internationally the comparable thing is the American Chemical Society’s reagent specifications, maintained by that society’s committee on analytical reagents, which writes the specifications and the test methods. It is a real, published, committee-written book. What it is not is a certification scheme. Nothing in the society’s own description of it suggests it tests, audits or certifies any manufacturer’s product, and the society itself draws a line between its specifications and pharmacopoeial compliance, which is the thing with legal standing. So “ACS grade” on a label is a supplier’s self-declaration against a published book. That is a great deal better than a word with no book behind it, and still not a certificate.
We did not reach the text of the ACS reagent book itself — it is a paywalled subscription work — so no specification value anywhere in this article is attributed to it, and we deliberately name no edition. We also found no statute anywhere incorporating it, and found nothing saying it has no legal force either. That question is open in both directions on our evidence.
The deepest misconception about grade names is that they must be a purity ladder — that given any two grades, one is purer. Two Indian Standards show plainly that this is not so.
This is the example worth memorising, because money changes hands over it. IS 251 : 1998 states that the material shall be of three grades — dense, medium and light — depending upon the bulk density. The approximate bands are 951 to 1250 kg per cubic metre for dense, 751 to 950 for medium, and 500 to 750 for light.
All three grades share one identical chemical table. Total alkalinity 98.5% minimum, matter insoluble in water 0.15% maximum, iron as Fe2O3 0.007% maximum, the same figures for all three. (Note the basis: that standard expresses iron as the oxide, while the hydrochloric acid figures quoted later in this article are expressed as Fe. A limit is only comparable to another limit on the same basis — which is itself a reason to read the standard rather than a summary of it.) Dense soda ash is not purer than light soda ash. It is heavier per unit volume, it flows and conveys differently, it dusts less and it behaves differently in a glass furnace. Those are real and often decisive differences. They are not purity, and a price premium justified on purity grounds is being justified on the wrong grounds.
That standard also shows how a specification handles end uses without creating new grades: footnotes vary two limits by application rather than by grade — the sulphate ceiling is relaxed for material from a modified Solvay process, and the chloride ceiling is tightened for the sodium bichromate industry. Your end use can change the numbers you need without changing the grade you order, which is exactly why the end use belongs in the enquiry.
IS 1070 : 1992 grades reagent grade water for laboratory use into three, described by what each is fit for — Grade 1 for trace analysis where interference must be minimal, Grade 2 for general analytical work where freedom from organic impurities matters most, Grade 3 for washing glassware and as feed water. The parameters that separate them are specific conductivity, pH, non-volatile residue, silica and a permanganate colour-retention time. The standard sets no assay at all — there is nothing to assay — and none appears in its list of characteristics.
We could not read the numeric limits in that standard’s table, so none is quoted here. The structural point stands without them.
In IS 265 : 1993, Technical and Boiler water grades are described as clear, colourless or light yellow, while Chemical pure and Analytical reagent are colourless fuming liquids. In IS 266 : 1993, Technical grade sulphuric acid is expressly permitted to be not darker than brown in colour. Colour is therefore a grade characteristic in its own right, and a consignment can be off-grade on appearance while assaying perfectly well. If colour matters in your process, it is a line item, not an assumption.
In BIS chemical specifications the assay is written Min and the impurities are written Max. Neither is a target, and neither is a band. (Other kinds of characteristic can be two-sided — a pH, a density, a particle size — so this is a rule about assay and impurity rows, not about every row in a table.) We have set this out at length elsewhere in this series for hydrochloric acid, and will not repeat the reasoning here; the general rule is what matters for grade names.
Naming a grade therefore commits a seller to a minimum and to a set of ceilings, and to nothing else. If you need a strength, state the strength and a tolerance, separately from the grade. If you need a maximum as well as a minimum — and in several processes an over-strength delivery is as unwelcome as an under-strength one — state it, because the standard will not.
The exceptions are worth knowing because they are the only ones we found. A sub-grade can itself be a concentration class: IS 266 : 1993 gives battery grade sulphuric acid two sub-grades, concentrated and dilute. And a footnote can vary a limit by end use, as IS 251 does. Outside those patterns, assume a floor.
Follow the numbers across the IS 265 grade ladder and the assay barely moves while the impurity ceilings move by orders of magnitude. (This is not a universal rule, and the article’s other example shows why: in IS 252 : 1991 the assay moves from 95.00% to 99.50% across one step, which is a real move on strength.) In IS 265 : 1993, going from Technical to Analytical reagent raises the total acidity minimum from 30.0% to 32.0% — two percentage points, about 6.7% in relative terms. Over the same step, the iron ceiling falls from 0.005% to 0.00004%, a factor of about 125, and the residue on ignition ceiling falls from 0.1% to 0.0005%, a factor of 200.
In that standard, that is what you are actually buying when you move up a grade. Only marginally more product in the drum — and a far tighter ceiling on what else is in it. Which leads to the practical rule: if a specific impurity is what hurts your process, name that impurity and its limit. Climbing the grade ladder to get one impurity down means paying for every other impurity to come down too, and it still does not oblige the seller to the number you actually care about unless you write it in.
The impurity figures in the paragraph above are from IS 265 : 1993, the superseded fourth revision. They are quoted to show the ratio between grades, which is the point being made. Do not write them into a purchase order without the current edition in front of you.
“IP” is different in kind from everything above, and this is the part of the article where getting it wrong has consequences beyond a commercial dispute.
The Indian Pharmacopoeia is published by the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission on behalf of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and it is the official book of standards for drugs in India. Its force runs through the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940: section 16(1)(a) defines standard quality for a drug as compliance with the standard set out in the Second Schedule, and the Second Schedule points, for drugs included in the Indian Pharmacopoeia, to the edition for the time being in force — with a fallback to the immediately preceding edition where the current one does not carry the standard, so a monograph dropped from a new edition does not simply cease to be official. A drug that fails that standard is not of standard quality, and manufacturing, selling or distributing it is an offence. Imported drugs are caught by a separate set of provisions earlier in the same Act, which apply the Second Schedule to imports.
The labelling rule is sharper still. The letters “I.P.” may be put on a label only for the purpose of indicating that the drug accords with the standards set out in the Indian Pharmacopoeia. Using them otherwise makes the product misbranded. “IP grade” is a regulated statement, not a sales adjective — and the distinction matters to a trader, because the obligation attaches when the material is being supplied as a drug.
Foreign pharmacopoeias enter Indian law through a narrow door. The Second Schedule provides separately for drugs not included in the Indian Pharmacopoeia but included in the official pharmacopoeia of another country, and the Commission’s own guidance states that other pharmacopoeias apply only in cases the Indian Pharmacopoeia does not cover. So in India, BP, USP and EP are fallbacks for what the IP does not cover, not alternatives a seller may pick between. If a specification says USP for something the IP covers, somebody should be asked why.
One more thing often misread: the United States Pharmacopeia is a non-governmental standards body. Its text has legal effect in the United States because a US statute designates it an official compendium, and the body itself states plainly that enforcement is for the regulator and that it has no role in enforcement. Note a distinction it is easy to slide over: that body does run its own voluntary verification programmes, under which it audits facilities, tests samples and awards a verification mark. What a compendium does is set the specification. Whether a given batch conforms to it is a separate question, and by default the answer comes from whoever ships the batch. Independent conformity assessment does exist — BIS, for one, can grant a certificate of conformity for a batch or lot — but it is a distinct act that somebody has to commission, and it is not what a grade name on an invoice refers to.
Our reading of the Second Schedule comes from the Pharmacopoeia Commission’s own published guidance quoting it, not from the Schedule text itself, which we could not reach. On editions: a 2026 edition of the Indian Pharmacopoeia has been released and its own introduction states that it supersedes the 2022 edition. What we could not establish is its effective date, which is stated in the printed book rather than online, and an edition governs from that date. We therefore name no edition as being in force today. That reading of the instruments together is ours and is not a ruling.
This is the grade name that generates the most enquiries and the most misunderstanding, so it gets the longest treatment. The short answer is that we could find no body in India, or anywhere, that certifies a chemical as food grade.
There is a statutory definition of “food grade” in Indian food law. It is in the packaging regulations made in 2018, and it defines the term for packaging material — material made of substances that are safe and suitable for their intended use, that will not endanger human health or cause an unacceptable change in the composition or organoleptic characteristics of the food.
That definition is about the drum, not about what is in it. For the chemical itself there is no statutory definition of food grade anywhere we could find.
The nearest the regulations come to defining the phrase for a substance is the clause on specifications for the identity and purity of food additives, which requires that additives be of appropriate food grade quality, conform to the applicable specifications of identity and purity, and be produced, stored, transported and handled in accordance with good manufacturing practice. The same clause states that food grade quality is achieved by conformance to the specifications as a whole — not merely with individual criteria — together with those GMP conditions.
In other words: food grade is a state the material is in, evidenced by conformity to a named specification and by how it has been handled. It is a claim, properly supported by test data. It is not a badge, because there is no issuer. A supplier offering a “food grade certificate” is offering their own document, and it should be read as one.
It is also worth separating two things the regulations keep separate: permission — which additive may go into which food, at what level — and identity and purity — what the substance must be. They live in different parts of the regulations, and conformity with one says nothing about the other. An on-specification batch used in a food or at a level the permission tables do not allow is still a problem.
This one surprises people, and the Indian numbers settle it. In the food additive purity criteria, sodium hydroxide is specified at not less than 95% as NaOH, and phosphoric acid at not less than 85% as H3PO4.
Neither is a high-assay figure. Look back at the table above and the comparison makes itself: technical grade caustic soda under IS 252 : 1991 carries the same 95% minimum as the food specification. The food specification does its work somewhere else entirely — in the ceilings on arsenic, lead, mercury, fluoride, chloride and sulphate, and in the GMP conditions around production and handling. Food grade is an impurity-profile and handling claim, not a high-assay claim. Anyone quoting “food grade, 99.9% pure” as though the two were the same statement has not read either one.
The regulations give chemical-by-chemical purity criteria for a limited list only. Where a substance is a permitted additive but has no entry in that list, there is no Indian number to conform to. On our reading, that is the position for sodium bicarbonate and for soda ash: both are permitted in various uses, and neither has identity and purity criteria we could locate in the regulations.
That is a genuinely awkward gap, and it is the gap that a trader and a food manufacturer have to close between themselves. Where India sets no specification, the specification has to come from somewhere the contract names — a foreign monograph, an international compendium, or an agreed schedule of limits. What it cannot come from is the words “food grade” on a quotation.
The legally meaningful marks on an Indian additive package are not the words food grade. Under the labelling regulations made in 2020, an additive package is to be marked prominently with the words FOR USE IN FOOD, and the additive named in the form the food additive regulations use. A non-retail package — the bulk drum or bag case — carries the name, net quantity, the food authority logo and licence number, date marking, lot number, and the name and address of the manufacturer or packer, with NOT FOR RETAIL SALE on the package.
So the thing to look for on an incoming drum is FOR USE IN FOOD and a lot number, not the phrase food grade. And a licence number on a label or a certificate tells you who is accountable; it does not tell you what is in the drum.
On the packaging itself, the 2018 regulations require that material in direct contact with food be of food grade quality, and separately require the food business operator to obtain a certificate of conformity from a NABL accredited laboratory for packaging material that comes into direct contact with food. That certificate is a real, checkable document, and it is the one worth asking for — more so than any certificate bearing the words food grade, since the regulations provide for no such certificate.
This matters, and it cuts in both directions. Indian food law reaches storage, transportation, distribution and the sale of food ingredients, so a trader in food additives is carrying on a food business and is a food business operator, with a licensing or registration obligation of its own. Separately, the buyer, as a food manufacturer, carries an express duty: raw materials, additives and ingredients must conform to the regulations and standards, and records of them and of their source of procurement must be kept available for inspection.
Those are two duties, not one, and neither discharges the other. A buyer who relies on the seller holding a licence has not performed the buyer’s own duty, and a seller who relies on the buyer to notice an off-specification consignment has not performed the seller’s.
A figure worth updating in your own files. The turnover thresholds that separate registration from a State licence from a Central licence were revised with effect from 1 April 2026, to up to Rs 1.5 crore for registration, above that and up to Rs 50 crore for a State licence, and above Rs 50 crore for a Central licence. Almost every advisory page still prints the older figures. We verified this from the food authority’s own implementing order; we did not open the amending gazette notification itself, so we do not state which provisions it amends. Importers of food ingredients and additives for commercial use sit in the central licensing schedule independently of turnover.
Certification by the Bureau of Indian Standards is voluntary by default. It becomes mandatory only where a Quality Control Order has been issued, which is done by the administering ministry rather than by BIS. The department responsible for chemicals publishes the list, and when we read it, it ran to 33 chemical orders, each naming an Indian Standard. That published list is not fully current — orders have been made and rescinded since its last update — so check it rather than relying on a count.
Two commercial consequences follow, and buyers routinely get both wrong.
| Chemical | Quality Control Order? | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Caustic soda | Yes — against IS 252 : 2013, notified 3 April 2018 | ISI marking is a legal requirement, not a contractual option |
| Ortho phosphoric acid | Yes — against IS 798 : 2020 | Same |
| Hydrogen peroxide | Yes — against IS 2080 : 1980 | Same |
| Hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, soda ash, sodium bicarbonate, citric acid | No | Conformity to the Indian Standard is purely contractual — it binds only because your purchase order says it does |
The table reflects the department’s published list as we read it, and that list is not fully current. Check the position for your own chemical rather than relying on the table or on ours.
The first consequence is that for the unlisted chemicals, naming the standard and its edition in the contract is the only thing that makes it apply. There is no statutory backstop.
The second is the one that costs money. Where a Quality Control Order does apply, the mandated standard is a technical standard. An ISI-marked drum of caustic soda is marked against a technical specification. It is not thereby food grade, and the mark is not evidence that it is. We could not read the order texts themselves, so we do not say whether food grade material is inside or outside their scope — that question is open, and we are not going to guess at it in either direction.
We list sodium bicarbonate as technical grade. Put the article’s tests to that line and here is what it is worth.
So the catalogue line “sodium bicarbonate, technical grade” carries, strictly, no specification at all until a specification is attached to it. That is true of the same phrase in anybody’s catalogue, which is rather the point of saying it about our own. What should follow a grade name in an enquiry is a specification, and if the grade name is doing the work of one, something has been left out.
It also sets the limit on what anyone may write. No page and no quotation should ever claim conformity to an “IS 2124 technical grade”, because nobody involved has established that the standard defines one. Claiming a grade from a standard is a claim about the standard, and it is checkable.
Four cautions, and they apply to us as much as to anyone.
Everything above reduces to a short drafting habit. A grade name can stay in the document — it is useful shorthand — as long as it is not carrying weight on its own.
What we can do is tell you what the producer’s documentation actually says, against which standard and which edition, and what grade name the producer uses for the material — so far as our supply arrangements let us. We will name the producer where those arrangements permit it, and tell you where they do not, and we will tell you whether we are supplying in the producer’s original packaging.
What we cannot do is turn a grade name into a specification by agreeing to it. If an enquiry says technical grade and nothing else, the answer that is worth anything is a question back about the application. Where an application brings a licensing or regulatory requirement — food, pharmaceutical, potable water, or a scheduled substance — tell us the application and we will confirm in writing whether we can supply against it. We state no licence or registration position for ourselves on this page, because a page is the wrong place for one: the answer depends on the substance, the application and the state you are receiving in. That is why it belongs in writing against a specific enquiry, and why you should want the same from any supplier rather than a line on a website.
We do not issue third-party certificates, and we do not operate a laboratory. Where a specification needs independent evidence, the route is testing at an independent laboratory, or at one you nominate, on a jointly drawn and sealed sample, with that report alongside the producer’s certificate rather than instead of it.
What we do not give is a warranty that the material will perform in your process, and our terms say so. That is a reason to put the purpose in the contract and let it be answered there, rather than a reason to rely on a grade name. Ask the same of any supplier, from us or anyone else, and do not accept a grade name as the answer.
LR, GR, extra pure and most uses of “commercial” have no definer; they mean whatever that supplier’s sheet says. “Technical” is defined, but only inside individual standards, where it means 95% for one chemical, 30% for another and 98.5% for a third. A grade is not always a purity ladder — soda ash light and dense have one identical chemical table and are separated by bulk density, which changes handling and furnace behaviour but not purity. Where there is an assay it is a floor, and the real work a grade does is on impurity ceilings, which can move by a factor of a hundred or more across one step. “AR” has real specifications behind it, Indian and foreign, but certification against them is voluntary, so an AR claim is usually the supplier’s own. “IP” has statutory force under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act and is a regulated statement rather than a sales adjective. “Food grade” is conformity to a named specification plus good manufacturing practice, and we found no body in India issuing a certificate of it; the Indian purity criteria for sodium hydroxide and phosphoric acid are 95% and 85% so it is not a purity claim, and the mark to look for on a drum is FOR USE IN FOOD and a lot number. Name the standard, name the edition, state the strength and the impurities separately, and tell your supplier the application.
In practice
Questions
Only inside individual product standards, and it means something different in each. In the editions we could read, technical grade caustic soda is 95% NaOH minimum, technical grade hydrochloric acid is 30% total acidity minimum, and the soda ash standard that is titled technical sets 98.5% total alkalinity minimum across all three of its grades. We found no standard, statute or glossary defining the term on its own. A quotation that says technical grade and names no standard has specified nothing.
AR, analytical reagent, has real published specifications behind it — the Bureau of Indian Standards both publishes standalone analytical reagent standards and names AR as a grade inside product standards such as IS 265 and IS 266. For LR we could find no defining body at all. Every source describing it was a supplier catalogue or an explainer. Treat LR as that supplier’s own designation and ask for the sheet behind it.
No, and the numbers are not even in that range for many substances. In IS 265 : 1993, analytical reagent hydrochloric acid has a total acidity minimum of 32.0%, because concentrated hydrochloric acid is an aqueous solution. What separates AR from technical in that standard is the impurity ceilings — iron at 0.00004% against 0.005%, a factor of 125. Any single percentage attached to LR or AR without naming the substance and the specification is meaningless.
No. IS 251 : 1998 grades soda ash as dense, medium and light depending upon bulk density, and all three grades share one identical chemical table — total alkalinity 98.5% minimum, insolubles 0.15% maximum, iron as Fe2O3 0.007% maximum. The grades differ in handling, dusting, conveying and furnace behaviour, all of which can matter a great deal. They do not differ in purity.
Nobody that we could find. The food regulations describe food grade quality as being achieved by conformance to the applicable specifications of identity and purity as a whole, together with good manufacturing practice in production, storage, transport and handling. That is a state the material is in, evidenced by test data — not a certificate anyone issues. A supplier offering a food grade certificate is offering their own document.
No. The Indian food additive purity criteria set sodium hydroxide at not less than 95% as NaOH and phosphoric acid at not less than 85% as H3PO4. Both are below what many industrial buyers expect from ordinary technical material. The food specification does its work in the ceilings on arsenic, lead, mercury, fluoride, chloride and sulphate, and in the handling conditions. It is an impurity-profile and handling claim.
No. A licence attaches to a food business and its premises, not to a consignment. It tells you who is accountable. Using the logo and licence number as a product claim is separately restricted by the advertising and claims regulations. What the labelling regulations actually require on an additive package is the words FOR USE IN FOOD, with NOT FOR RETAIL SALE and a lot number on a non-retail pack.
No. Certification by the Bureau of Indian Standards is voluntary unless a Quality Control Order applies, and where one does apply, the standard it mandates is a technical standard. Caustic soda is under such an order against IS 252 : 2013 — so an ISI-marked drum of caustic soda is marked against a technical specification, which says nothing about food suitability. We could not read the order texts, so we do not state whether food grade material falls inside or outside their scope.
No, and this is the one grade name with teeth. The Indian Pharmacopoeia is the official book of standards for drugs in India, and the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 defines standard quality for a drug by reference to it. The letters I.P. are permitted on a label only to indicate that the drug accords with those standards; using them otherwise makes the product misbranded, and material failing the standard is not of standard quality, which is an offence to sell or distribute. The obligation attaches when the material is supplied as a drug.
Not freely, in India. The Second Schedule to the Drugs and Cosmetics Act provides for foreign pharmacopoeias only for drugs not included in the Indian Pharmacopoeia, and the Pharmacopoeia Commission states that other pharmacopoeias apply only in cases the IP does not cover. If a specification names USP for something the IP covers, that is worth querying. Note also that the United States Pharmacopeia is a non-governmental body that states it has no role in enforcement. Its own voluntary verification programmes are a separate thing from compendial compliance, and neither of them is a certificate that your consignment is of a grade.
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Sourcing desk
Velora Chemicals is a bulk supplier and trader sourcing from qualified manufacturers, not a manufacturer. Send us the standard, the edition and the parameters your process actually needs, and we will tell you what the producer’s documentation says against them, so far as our supply arrangements permit — and confirm in writing whether we can supply against your application.
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