‘Indian Customs Single Window Project — Online message exchange between Customs and other regulatory agencies

Cir­cu­lar No. 09/2015-Cus

dat­ed the 31st March, 2015

Sub­ject: Online mes­sage exchange between Cus­toms and oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies — reg.

Hon’ble Finance Min­is­ter in the Bud­get, 2014 made an announce­ment to imple­ment ‘Indi­an Cus­toms Sin­gle Win­dow Project’ to facil­i­tate trade. This project envis­ages that the importers and exporters would elec­tron­i­cal­ly lodge their Cus­toms clear­ance doc­u­ments at a sin­gle point only with the Cus­toms. The required per­mis­sion, if any, from oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies (such as Ani­mal Quar­an­tine, Plant Quar­an­tine, Drug Con­troller, Tex­tile Com­mit­tee etc.) would be obtained online with­out the importer/exporter hav­ing to sep­a­rate­ly approach these agen­cies. This would be pos­si­ble through a com­mon, seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed IT sys­tems uti­lized by all reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies and the importers/exporters.  The Sin­gle Win­dow would thus pro­vide the importers/exporters a sin­gle point inter­face for Cus­toms clear­ance of import and export goods there­by reduc­ing inter­face with Gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies, dwell time and cost of doing business.

2.  In the direc­tion of estab­lish­ing the Sin­gle Win­dow with all reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, the Board has decid­ed to make a begin­ning by imple­ment­ing an elec­tron­ic online mes­sage exchange between the Food Safe­ty and Stan­dards Author­i­ty of India (FSSAI) and the Depart­ment of Plant Pro­tec­tion, Quar­an­tine and Stor­age (PQIS) with the Cus­toms with effect from 01.04.2015 at JNPT (Nhava­She­va), ICD, Tugh­lak­abad and ICD,Patparganj. Under the new online mes­sage exchange sys­tem for import goods between these two agen­cies viz. FSSAI and PQIS and the Cus­toms, there will be seam­less online exchange in real time of the Cus­toms Bill of Entry (Import dec­la­ra­tion) with these agen­cies and Release Order (RO) from both the agen­cies will be received by the Cus­toms in elec­tron­ic mes­sage format.

3.  The salient fea­ture of the new online mes­sage exchange sys­tem would be as under:

(i)  Indi­an Cus­toms EDI (ICES) would trans­mit “BE mes­sage” to the FSSAI and PQIS on com­ple­tion of assess­ment of the rel­e­vant Bills of Entry (Bs/E) by the Cus­toms ICES appli­ca­tion after entry-inward of the con­sign­ment. The BE mes­sage would be pro­vid­ed to FSSAI/PQIS for all Bs/E falling under the iden­ti­fied Cus­tom Tar­iff Heads (CTHs), as per list made avail­able by there­spec­tive agencies.

(ii) The Cus­toms offi­cers would be able to access the details of the Bs/E referred by the ICES to FSSAI/PQIS.

(iii) The importers would be able to track the sta­tus of the Bs/E on ICEGATE (https://www.icegate.gov.in).

(iv)  The receipt of the Bs/E mes­sage shall be acknowl­edged by the FSSAI/PQIS through a receipt mes­sage to the ICES.

(v)  On pro­cess­ing of the Bs/E mes­sage by the FSSAI/PQIS, these agen­cies would elec­tron­i­cal­ly trans­mit an RO, con­cern­ing each item of the Bs/E. From the Cus­toms side, Out of Charge (OOC) will not be allowed in the sys­tem till the RO is received from the agency con­cerned for all the items. There are 6 types of ROs which may be pro­vid­ed by the FSSAI/PQIS to the ICES, as follows:

(a)        Release — goods can be released by the Customs.

(b)        Destruc­tion — goods to be destruc­t­ed by the Customs.

©        Depor­ta­tion — goods to be export­ed back to the Coun­try of Origin.

(d)        No Objec­tion Cer­tifi­cate (NOC)- goods can be released by the Customs.

(e)        NCC (Non-com­pli­ance Cer­tifi­cate) — non-rec­ti­fi­able defects observed in the goods.

(f)         Prod­uct Out of scope — goods are out of scope for FSSAI/PQIS.

In case, the Release Order falls under types(b), © and (e) above, the OOC would not be allowed in the ICES. Details of such con­sign­ments will be entered by the Cus­toms Assess­ing Offi­cer in the clo­sure of B/E menu after all process­es are complete.

(vi)  On receipt of RO online, the Cus­toms ICES shall inte­grate the data in the ICES data­base, which shall be avail­able to the Cus­toms offi­cers concerned.

(vii)  The oth­er for­mal­i­ties under the Cus­toms Act, 1962 such as duty pay­ment, goods reg­is­tra­tion, exam­i­na­tion would con­tin­ue dur­ing the time inter­val between trans­mis­sion of Bs/E mes­sage from ICES to the receipt of RO mes­sage from FSSAI/PQIS. Dur­ing this peri­od the sam­ples of the goods under con­sid­er­a­tion may also be tak­en for test­ing purposes.

4.     As afore­men­tioned, all Bs/E falling under the iden­ti­fied Cus­tom Tar­iff Heads (CTHs), as per list made avail­able by the FSSAI, would auto­mat­i­cal­ly be sent by the ICES to this agency. How­ev­er, in terms of Board’s Cir­cu­lar No.3/2011-Cus dat­ed 06.01.2011 import con­sign­ments that have been test­ed on pre­vi­ous five con­sec­u­tive occa­sions and found in order may not be referred to FSSAI. There­fore, this Cir­cu­lar will be imple­ment­ed by the Cus­toms offi­cers by not wait­ing for the RO from FSSAI in such cas­es. The ICES pro­vides a func­tion­al­i­ty for this pur­pose.  This mea­sure would be in place till a sys­tem based solu­tion is devel­oped. A pro­ce­dure for inform­ing FSSAI that the RO is not required in such cas­es is also being examined.

5.     Since, the elec­tron­i­cal­ly received RO in regard to Bs/E referred to FSSAI/PQIS shall be accept­ed by the Cus­toms for clear­ance of the import­ed foods items/plant mate­ri­als, the Cus­toms shall not insist that a phys­i­cal copy of the RO shall be issued by these agen­cies.  Board also desires that the Cus­toms should main­tain a close liai­son with these two agen­cies to ensure that respons­es from these agen­cies are received in time and there is no delay in clear­ance of goods except in cas­es where sam­pling is required.

6.     It is clar­i­fied that as some of details required for oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies may not be cur­rent­ly cap­tured in the B/E for­mat, in such cas­es, the importers would con­tin­ue to fur­nish these addi­tion­al details to the respec­tive agency. Fur­ther, the mode and man­ner of pay­ment of fee and oth­er charges of oth­er agen­cies will con­tin­ue to be the same as per the exist­ing practice.

7.     Chief Com­mis­sion­ers of Customs/Central Excise are request­ed to sen­si­tize staff work­ing under their juris­dic­tion to ensure the smooth imple­men­ta­tion of the online mes­sage exchange sys­tem between the Cus­toms and FSSAI/PQIS. It may also be ensured that proac­tive action is tak­en to iden­ti­fy Bs/E for which the RO has not been received from FSSAI/PQIS with­in a rea­son­able time so that the same could be got expe­dit­ed. The Board has sep­a­rate­ly ini­ti­at­ed a dia­logue with these agen­cies to pre­scribe time­lines for issue of ROs.

8.     Dif­fi­cul­ty faced, if any, may be brought to the notice of the Board at the ear­li­est. Fur­ther, a suit­able Pub­lic Notice may be issued for the infor­ma­tion of the Trade with a copy to the local offices of FSSAI and PQIS.