NRIs can’t get tricolour shipped to them

MUMBAI:It’s Independence Day. You are, say, an NRI in the US, and you want to hoist the Indian tricolour in your yard. You have ordered a made-in-India national flag several weeks ago but August 15 comes and goes, the flag doesn’t arrive. So, the NRI flies a Chinamade Indian national flag. What happened? Did the courier company mess up? No. Courier companies don’t want to send the tricolour across Indian borders.

Most international courier companies —FedEx, TNT, UPS or DHL — do not accept the tricolour as a consignment to be shipped overseas. Nobody quite knows why. Even home ministry officials ET spoke to are puzzled. They said the flag code doesn’t specifically prohibit this.

But flag makers in India say something else. “None of the foreign couriers accept the tricolour… They don’t tell you why they’re not accepting it. They simply return the package to us saying: the tricolour can’t be transported or delivered abroad,” said Gyan Shah, owner of The Flag Corporation, a Mumbai-based flag maker. The courier companies were wary of speaking on the record on the issue. An UPS spokesperson said: “Certain items have strict compliance procedures or guidelines for export… Shipping of such items is subject to conditions and restrictions”.


Off record, people familiar with the issue say courier companies are reluctant to send national flags across borders because they feel such flags are a “restricted item”.

Another person said that one way round this is for an Indian manufacturer to ship out a bunch of national flags by marking the consignment as “sample fabric”.

Congress leader and lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who argued the famous national flag case for Naveen Jindal in the SC, told ET there should not be any blanket ban on transporting the tricolour across borders.