India launches several initiatives for contactless customs

08 Jul '20

2 min read

Pic: Shutterstock

Under its ‘Turant Customs’ programme to offer a ‘faceless, contactless and paperless’ service, India’s Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) recently introduced several initiatives to enhance the efficiency in customs clearance processes, leading to speedy clearances, transparency in decision making, ease of doing business and reduction in physical contact.

These initiatives include automated clearances of bills of entry, digitisation of customs documents, paperless clearance, faceless assessment and establishment of Turant Suvidha Kendras at Bengaluru and Chennai, according to a CBIC press release.

The board has now decided to open Turant Suvidha Kendras in all customs formations in phased manner.

CBIC has enabled from July 6 certain functionalities in CBIC’s e-commerce portal, the Indian Customs EDI Gateway (IceGate or ICES) that would reduce the need for physical interaction between customs and trade and also speed up customs clearance process.

Importers or their representatives are now required to physically visit customs houses for physical debit of bonds after the bill of entry is returned (to the importer) for the payment of duty. On review, it has been decided to do away with this requirement. Instead, ICES would automatically debit the bond and reflect the same in the first copy of the bill of entry.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)

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