Bringing equipment into Nepal

This page is about getting film equipment into Nepal and back out again. It covers the idea of temporary import, why the carnet you may already be planning around is unlikely to help, how gear is declared, why serial numbers and ownership records matter so much, what tends to get looked at closely, the special cases of batteries and drones and satellite kit, and how to fold customs into the shooting schedule rather than bolting it on at the end.

What follows is the shape of the process, not a current rulebook. Customs practice in Nepal changes, and so do the people applying it on any given morning. There are no fees quoted here and no promised clearance times, because both move and neither is ours to promise. Treat every form, sequence and timescale below as something to confirm with a clearing agent, and where relevant with the responsible authority, in the weeks before you fly.

One point is worth leading with, because it is the costliest thing producers get wrong about this country before they have even packed a case. The ATA Carnet is the standard temporary admission document across much of Europe, Japan, North America and parts of Asia. It is the passport for goods that freight agents reach for by default, and at the departure end it is quoted as the obvious way to send kit anywhere at all.

Nepal has not historically been part of that system. A carnet issued by your chamber of commerce is not a document Kathmandu customs is set up to open, stamp and discharge. This catches people out precisely because the departure-end agent is fluent in carnets and may never have cleared into Nepal specifically. The document sails out of your home country and then means very little on arrival.

The practical consequence is twofold. First, do not build your inbound plan on a carnet being endorsed here. Assume it will not be, and design the entry around a temporary import arrangement instead. Second, and easy to forget, your own customs authority at home still wants evidence that the kit you are re-importing is the kit you exported. If you were relying on a carnet discharge to prove that, you now need another route. A certified list of exported goods, an export declaration, or purchase and serial records usually does the job. Ask your home authority directly what it will accept for re-import, and ask your shipping agent, in writing, whether they have personally cleared goods into Nepal rather than merely shipped towards it. Membership and practice both move, so confirm the current position rather than trusting a habit.

Strip away the paperwork and temporary import is a simple bargain. You are telling the state that a defined list of valuable goods is coming in, will be used for a stated purpose, and will leave again within a defined period, unchanged in number and identity. In return, the goods are admitted without being treated as a commercial importation that attracts the duties and taxes a permanent import would.

Because it is a promise, it has to be secured. The security is money or a money-like instrument that the state can keep if the promise is broken, and returns when it is kept. In practice that means a cash deposit or a bank guarantee lodged against the declared value of the kit, released when the same kit is exported at the end. The exact mechanism, the size of the security and who holds it are things a clearing agent will tell you for your specific consignment. Do not plan around a number you read anywhere, including here, because there is no number here to read and any you find elsewhere is likely stale.

Two ideas follow from the bargain and run through everything else on this page. The first is identity: the state needs to be able to match what leaves against what arrived, item by item, which is why serial numbers matter more than almost anything. The second is intent: the state wants to believe this really is temporary, which is why filming permission, visas and the story you tell about the kit all feed into whether the temporary import reads as plausible rather than as a commercial shipment wearing a disguise. Get those two ideas right and most of the process becomes administration. Get them wrong and no amount of goodwill at the counter rescues the day.

If you build one thing well, build the manifest. It is the spine of the whole clearance, and almost every failure at the counter is really a manifest that did not match the kit or did not match the other paperwork.

Make it a spreadsheet with one line per serialised item: description, manufacturer, model, serial number, quantity, weight and declared value. Group the unserialised things, the cables, stands, sandbags, clamps and gels, into lots with a realistic total value each. List consumables separately from equipment. Consumables are gaffer tape, batteries you will use up, gels, markers and the like, and they are not coming back out. Pretending they will only creates a discrepancy at wrap when the export list cannot be made to match the import list.

Declared values should be honest, current replacement values. Undervaluing is a false economy that invites a reassessment you do not want to be present for, and can put the honesty of the whole manifest in question. Overvaluing quietly inflates whatever security you are asked to lodge, tying up more of the production’s money for longer. Aim for the number you would actually claim if the item were lost.

Then make the manifest agree with everything around it. The same serials and the same figures should appear on the airway bill, the packing list, the insurance schedule and anything filed with the permission application. A single body listed on the manifest but missing from the insurance schedule, or a serial that reads differently on two documents, is exactly the kind of small contradiction that turns a five-minute check into a two-hour one. Finally, and this is the step most often skipped, physically check the serials against the actual kit before you fly. A manifest copied from last year’s job, with two camera bodies quietly swapped at the hire house since, is a genuine problem at the point of inspection, and nobody discovers it at a worse moment than an officer with a torch and a clipboard.

Officers ask what the equipment is for. That single question is where the whole clearance is quietly decided, and the answer you want to be able to give is a document rather than an explanation. A production that can produce a filming permission naming the production, the dates and the locations reads completely differently from a group of visitors who have turned up with twenty cases of broadcast gear and a friendly story.

The filming permission and the customs entry sit with different bodies, and the sequence between them matters. The permission is what makes a temporary import plausible rather than a commercial importation dressed up as a visit. It is the difference between kit that is obviously here to do a defined job and leave, and kit that could be here to be sold. Where the permission is still in progress, being able to show that it is genuinely under way, with the right authority, is far better than nothing.

Approval routes differ depending on whether the work is news, documentary, commercial or a feature, and those routes change, so confirm the current one rather than reusing a note from an old production. The category you declare should match the work you are actually doing and the kit you are carrying to do it. Declaring the wrong category to seem smaller or simpler tends to create a mismatch that surfaces exactly when you least want it.

Visas belong in the same conversation, because they are part of the same question of intent. Crew arriving on a category of entry that does not match the work they are plainly equipped for is a mismatch people notice, and it is not something anyone can retrofit at the counter. Line the permission, the visas and the customs story up so that they all tell the same simple truth: this crew is here to make this defined thing, on these dates, and then to leave with everything it brought.

Not everything on a manifest gets the same attention. Understanding where the eye goes lets you prepare the right lines and avoid the discrepancies that turn a routine check into a search.

High-value and easily resold items attract interest, because they are the things a temporary import regime most wants to be sure will leave again. Camera bodies, lenses, drives and anything compact and expensive fall here. So do items whose count is easy to verify and easy to get wrong: bodies, lenses and, increasingly, batteries, which are often physically counted. A manifest that says three bodies had better present three bodies with the three listed serials.

Declared values are looked at, in both directions. A value that looks too low for the item invites reassessment and casts doubt on the rest of the list. A value that looks inflated raises its own questions and, separately, costs you in the size of the security. Consistency across the manifest, the insurance schedule and any ownership records is what makes values believable.

Then there are the items that are not really camera kit in the eyes of the state at all, and these draw a different kind of attention because they sit under other rules entirely. Drones and satellite communications devices are the two that most reliably cause trouble, and each gets its own treatment below. The general principle is that anything that transmits, flies, or could be sold as a consumer device deserves its own written enquiry well before departure, rather than a hopeful place on the camera manifest. Finally, the gap between what arrives and what leaves is scrutinised at wrap. Consumables that were never going to return, kit that broke, anything sold or left behind: all of it needs to have been anticipated on the way in, because the export is checked against the import and unexplained gaps are where the closing of the file stalls.

Batteries are their own small workstream and they cause more friction than their size suggests. They matter at three separate points, and it is easy to prepare for one and forget the other two.

The first is carriage by air. Lithium batteries are regulated as dangerous goods by airlines and aviation rules, with limits on watt-hours, on how many spares may travel, and on whether they go in the cabin or the hold. Large camera and drone batteries can sit near or above common thresholds, so check the current rules for your specific packs with the airline and the freight agent, and pack and label them accordingly. This is separate from customs and it applies before you have even landed.

The second is the count on arrival. Batteries are exactly the kind of high-quantity, easily verified item that gets physically counted, particularly alongside drones. Put them on the manifest honestly, as equipment where they are rechargeable working packs and as consumables where they are cells you will use up, and make the numbers match what is in the cases.

The third is the cold, which is a shooting problem rather than a customs one but belongs in the same plan because it changes how many you bring. Lithium cells lose usable capacity in cold and their voltage sags under load, so a pack that runs a camera for an hour in a warm room will do far less at altitude in winter. Carry more than the arithmetic suggests, keep spares warm against the body, and let a cold pack reach room temperature before charging, because charging lithium cells below freezing damages them. The number you carry is decided by the airline rules on the way in and by the cold once you are up, so reconcile the two before you pack.

Satellite phones and portable satellite internet terminals are not camera accessories in regulatory terms, and treating them as such is one of the more serious mistakes a production can make here. They fall under telecommunications control, and importing or operating them generally requires authorisation from the telecoms regulator that is entirely separate from anything customs issues. Assume nothing, and assume it early.

The same question applies to satellite messengers and trackers of the kind carried on treks, because those are transceivers too, even when they look like a small orange gadget clipped to a rucksack. A device being personal, or small, or sold openly at home, tells you nothing about whether it can be carried into Nepal, and certainly nothing about whether it can be switched on there.

Raise it early, in writing, and get a specific answer for the specific make and model, because the answer can differ between devices. The failure mode is worth being clear about, because it is not the one people brace for. It is rarely a fine. It is the device being held, and a communications problem that outlasts the shoot, along with the awkward questions that come from having tried to bring in controlled telecommunications equipment.

So plan communications so the schedule has a fallback that does not depend on satellite kit clearing at all. Mobile coverage reaches more of the country than it once did, and it remains far from uniform, dropping out in the valleys and on the high routes exactly where a crew is most spread out. Build the plan around not having a satellite link rather than around having one, treat any satellite device as a bonus that must be separately and properly authorised, and never let a day’s work hinge on a transceiver that may still be sitting in a locked room at the airport.

Drones get looked for. They are among the first things an inspection asks about, and carrying one in hand baggage in the hope it passes unremarked is simply how productions lose a drone for the length of a shoot.

The idea to hold onto is that approval to import a drone and approval to fly it in a particular place are two separate questions, and settling the first does not settle the second. You can clear the aircraft through customs and still have nowhere you are permitted to fly it, and you can have a location in mind that will never be approved regardless of how clean your import is.

The regulatory chain has typically involved the civil aviation authority alongside the home ministry and district-level administration, plus site-specific consent for national parks, protected heritage sites, and anywhere near the international airport or government and military installations. Several of Nepal’s most filmed regions sit inside conservation and national park areas, where aerial approval is a further hurdle on top of aviation and local administration, and inside a protected area it is the permission most often refused. None of that is fixed, so confirm the current requirements with the relevant authorities for your exact locations rather than reusing an old production’s notes.

On the day, expect the aircraft to be inspected, logged and matched against its paperwork, and expect its batteries to be counted along with everything else. Because of all this, treat aerial material as its own workstream with its own lead time, run in parallel with the rest of the customs planning rather than tacked on at the end. And, as with satellite kit, have a version of the edit that works without it. If a single sequence in the treatment depends on aerials that never get approved, that is a hole in the film discovered at the worst possible time. Plan the drone as unavailable until proved otherwise, and carry a ground-based alternative for every shot the treatment leans on.

A temporary import is only closed when the kit leaves, and the security you lodged is released against that export. It is tempting to treat the arrival as the hard part and the departure as a formality, but the file is not shut until the export is matched against the import, and everything on the manifest is expected to go back out, in the same quantity, with the same serial numbers.

That has practical consequences on the ground, and they are the kind that get forgotten in the tiredness of a wrap. Kit that breaks should still be exported, wreckage and all, rather than binned in a lodge or left with a grateful host, because a body that arrived has to be accounted for when it does not leave. Anything sold, gifted or left behind changes status and will need accounting for, quite possibly with duty payable, so a spontaneous decision to leave a spare monitor as a thank-you is not as free as it feels.

Genuine losses do happen. Kit falls, gets soaked, or vanishes, and that is a fact of mountain production rather than a failure. The thing that matters is documenting a loss when it happens, with the date and the circumstances, rather than reconstructing it from memory at the airport under time pressure. A short contemporaneous note is worth far more than a confident explanation offered at the departure terminal.

All of this is easier if the export is not being attempted by an exhausted producer two hours before an international flight. Build wrap time into the schedule as deliberately as you build in load-in time, keep copies of the closed-out entry, and agree in advance who chases the refund of the security after the crew has flown, and into which account it lands. That last step can run on for weeks past the shoot, long after everyone has scattered, so give it an owner while the production still exists to give it one.

Somebody’s name and somebody’s money sit behind every temporary import, and pretending otherwise is how a production discovers, at the worst moment, that nobody arranged the security or that the agent was never authorised to do what was assumed.

Decide early whether the security will be a cash deposit or a bank guarantee, because they cost the production in different ways. Cash ties up production funds for the length of the shoot plus however long the refund takes afterwards, which can be a while. A bank guarantee frees the cash but needs lead time from a bank willing to issue for the destination, and that is a conversation to start weeks out rather than a form to fill in at the end. Neither is right in the abstract; the choice depends on how much cash the production can spare to have sitting still, and how much notice the finance side has.

A local clearing agent is normally part of the picture on the freight side, and the relationship is worth defining rather than assuming. Ask exactly what the agent is authorised to do on your behalf, and get the scope in writing, so that there is no gap between what you think is being handled and what actually is. Put real budget lines against customs handling, storage, agent fees and a contingency day, because a day lost at the airport is crew, vehicles and accommodation all spent for nothing while the camera stays in a box.

Insurance sits alongside all of this and belongs with your broker, not with a conversation at the cargo terminal. Insurers have their own views on transit, on territory, and on whether kit is covered while it sits in bonded storage, and those are the moments when kit is most exposed and least under your control. Take that advice early, make sure the transit and storage phases are actually covered, and keep the person who compiled the manifest reachable by phone throughout the clearance window, because they are the one who can answer the question that unsticks the whole consignment.