IEC, PAN, and the trick that joins MCA to DGFT
Positions 3 to 12 of an IEC are the PAN. That single fact lets you build a complete India trade graph.
The Importer Exporter Code is a 10-digit identifier issued by DGFT. From 2017 onwards, IEC and PAN became one and the same: positions 3 through 12 of an IEC are the company's PAN. This means you can take a list of IEC holders from DGFT, extract the PAN, and join it against MCA records (where PAN is increasingly a required field on incorporation).
The join is not perfect. Companies incorporated before 2017 may have an older-format IEC that does not encode PAN. LLPs and partnership firms have PAN but may have a separate IEC issued under the prior format. For a company-level trade graph, you need to handle three buckets: (a) pure post-2017 IECs where IEC = PAN-encoded, (b) pre-2017 IECs that still hold today and need a separate PAN-to-IEC table, (c) IECs held by partnerships and proprietorships outside the MCA registry.
Once the join is built, every IEC holder maps to either a Companies Act entity, an LLP, or a partnership. Each gets the right firmographic record from the right registry. The trade activity (HS chapters, destinations, first-export date) attaches to the company, not to the IEC. From there the signal layer falls out naturally.
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