Article - 66 Week 26 Detained or Seized Cargo and the Notoriety Behind :

Article - 66  Week 26

Detained or Seized Cargo and the Notoriety Behind :

The sheer number of exporters, importers, shipping agents, and shipping lines in our land stand bewildered into submission by brute & twisted laws and a flagrant violation of any vestige of fairness and justice in them. But the fact is, they have behaved patiently and sans protestations, in spite of many forums to vent their views and facilitate trade. Let's take the case of 'Customs Detained' cargo in containers in seaports and especially Nhava Sheva. It is but natural that with volumes and volumes of Customs Books and their ever increasing volumes of riders and annexes, written in ambiguous words and phrases and no system of pre-screening of documents, a whole lot of uncalled for cargo lands in our CFSs. Many times the cargo is brought in to dupe the system through prior settings with the department officials in select places to evade high duties and they are caught accidentally. Some times, the importers are unaware of the changes made through notifications and get stuck on. No matter how, the Customs Detained cargo in containers are destined to have years of seizure inside the CFSs and the menace would grow exponentially with time. 

The importer has no easy way out. With passage of time he has to pay extremely high storage charges to the CFS and detention charges to the shipping line to release his cargo. There has been notifications of waiver of CFS charges under certain conditions of detention. But the shipping lines' detention charges fly exponentially and punitively high. 

As a precondition to set up a CFS, 10% of the area is to be set aside for such customs detained cargo. The CFS needs to remove the detained cargo from the containers and preserve in this 10% designated area and release the containers to the shipping line. But no CFS in Nhava Sheva resorts to this process in connivance with the department. So you would notice piles of such shipping lines' containers in all these CFSs. The shipping lines and their agents just give in to this unfair system. Many times they just abandon the boxes out of desperation. The CFS takes undue advantage of this misery and extracts what they can from the shipping lines.

This has given India a very notorious reputation among the shipping lines doing business here. They ridicule our system, our people, our laws, and unfair practices. This happens only in India. You would be surprised that this gross violation of justice and fair practice is uncommon in many African countries or even blatant military establishments like Myanmar, while it is a regular thing in India. Let us clean up the system.

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