India plans to challenge the WTO ruling which declared its tariffs on imports of mobile phones and certain other electronic goods were violative of its commitments made to the trade organisation.

“India will appeal before the appellate body,” senior commerce ministry officials said. India has time till May 30 to file an appeal.

The appeal will be filed by India in the WTO's appellate body, which is the final authority on such trade disputes.

The appellate body of the WTO is not functioning because of differences among member countries to appoint representatives in this body. Several disputes are already pending with the appellate body. The US has been blocking the appointment of the members.

Even if the appellate body, which is the final arbiter on such trade disputes, starts working now, it would take over a year to take up India's appeal.

The appellate body has been made redundant since 2019. The US has stopped appointing judges after their terms expired in 2017.

The number of judges are now less than three, which is below the minimum required to pass judgments.

“The way forward is to challenge this decision in the Appellate Body, which is non-functional due to the US blocking its judges' appointments. India can continue with the duties till the Appellate Body validates the findings of the panel,” Pralok Gupta, Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, said.

India had been dragged into dispute settlement by the EU which filed its first complaint in April 2019.

The EU demanded the setting up of a panel to discuss the issue which set off the dispute settlement process in February 2020. It was soon joined by several other WTO members including China, US, Indonesia and Chinese Taipei who expressed interest in joining the proceedings.

During the two-year-long process, India had argued that an inadvertent “error” had occurred during the transposition of its WTO Schedule of commitments from the HS2002 to the HS2007. HS stands for Harmonised System of classifying goods.