Rugged RFID Tags.

Not by itself. IP67 on the ingress-protection scale describes resistance to dust and to brief immersion in water. It says nothing about high-pressure or steam cleaning, which is tested separately under a higher class such as IP69K, and nothing about solvents, fuels or sustained heat. Those depend on the housing material: ABS and PC suit general industrial use, while PPS or silicone are the choices where temperature or chemical exposure is harsher. Construction matters as much as the rating, which is why Identium builds harsh-environment tags with ultrasonic welding and epoxy potting rather than snap-fitted shells. It is often the mounting, not the tag body, that fails first, so when specifying a rugged tag say whether it will be riveted, cable-tied, adhesive-mounted or epoxied, and what it will actually be exposed to.

Treat those as datasheet maximums, measured with a fixed reader, a high-gain antenna and clear line of sight. Real installations deliver less: passive UHF at a fixed read point typically lands around 10-15 m in clear conditions, and shorter again where metal racking, liquids, forklift bodies, awkward tag orientation or permitted reader power work against you. A handheld reads considerably shorter than a fixed portal because it has less antenna and less power behind it, and compact on-metal tags are rated in single-figure metres by design. Scope around the distance you genuinely need at the read point, whether that is a dock door, a bin lift or an aisle gate, rather than the headline figure, and confirm it in your own environment during a pilot. Identium's guide to read range and environment explains how to measure it properly.

Choose by the read distance the application needs. For bins, pallets, crates and plant assets read at a distance or in bulk, use passive UHF at 865-868 MHz, India's delicensed band under the 2021 WPC short-range-device rules; those tags follow EPC Gen2, formally ISO/IEC 18000-63 and marketed as RAIN RFID. Choose HF at 13.56 MHz (ISO 14443 and ISO 15693, the families that include MIFARE and DESFire) for a deliberate centimetre-range tap, such as a guard-patrol checkpoint or a maintenance round. If the tap must work with an ordinary smartphone, specify an NFC-compliant HF chip and say so on the order, because not every HF chip family is readable by every phone and the 125/134 kHz LF version of the same housing is not phone-readable at all. EPC Gen2 and RAIN RFID are passive-UHF terms only: the HF or LF build of an identical-looking housing is not EPC Gen2. See UHF vs HF vs NFC.

There is no single list price; rugged tags are quoted against a written specification. The main cost drivers are housing size and material, whether the build is a standard off-metal tag or an on-metal construction designed to work against a metal surface, the chip and memory specified, the sealing method such as ultrasonic welding or epoxy potting, any customisation (laser marking or engraving, artwork, serial numbering, pre-encoding of tag data such as EPC numbers on UHF tags), and order volume. Custom hard tags are typically a 5-10 day turnaround depending on volume and finishing, and units are tested in-house before dispatch. Send the asset type, surface material, mounting method, operating environment and annual quantity, and Identium will quote from its New Delhi factory.

A passive tag is not itself licensed. It has no transmitter and only backscatters the reader's signal, so the regulated device is the reader. As of 2026, UHF RFID in India operates in the 865-868 MHz band, which the WPC has delicensed for low-power use, and reader and antenna equipment should be approved for that band; confirm the current position with the WPC or BIS rather than relying on a datasheet alone. Identium is BIS certified, and the UHF readers and antennas it supplies are WPC-approved for India's licence-exempt UHF RFID band. Be aware that readers built for the United States run at roughly 902-928 MHz, which is not India's allocation, so check which region a reader was configured for. Background in our BIS and WPC buyer's guide.