It is proposed that a dust-acoustic instability driven by streaming ions could be a possible mechanism for the excitation of dust waves in an inductive gas-discharge plasma experiment reported by Zobnin et al (Zobnin A V, Usachev A D, Petrov O F and Fortov V E 2002 J. Exp. Theoret. Phys.95 429). We assume that the ions drift relative to the charged dust due to the presence of a background electric field. Comparisons with features of the experimental results are discussed.