Article - 77 Week 37 We Need A Nw Rule Book

Article - 77  Week 37

We Need A New Rule Book

India has changed. The world looks at us with a curious mix of awe and frown : awe for what we have achieved or promise to achieve and frown for sticking to insane archaic rules and processes reminiscent of the pre-digital era. Let's discuss the export and import processes pertaining to declarations before the shipments arrive or depart our country. No country of India's might and stature does it this way any more. In today's world, every aspect of trade is highly specialized. There is a clear divide between the carrier and the owner of the cargo. The owner of goods is a clearly seen and visible entity and is fully responsible towards the ownership of his possessions. On the other hand, the carrier is the custodian of the goods until fulfillment of the contracts of carriage with the owner of the goods. 

However, in the sailing ship era, this was not the case. You could never see the entities behind the ownership of the goods. You could barely communicate with them. When a ship called upon a port, the government and its officials of this host country knew nothing about the owner of the goods. They saw the ship with the cargo and it's Master. The Master represented every thing. He could sell the cargo and do whatever he wanted to. He owned the cargo in proxy. Therefore, it was incumbent upon him to declare the cargo to its last ''t''. He had every reason and interest to declare wrongly either to avoid duty or artificially inflate the price of the cargo. He was a direct beneficiary of these extra revenues. Therefore, the Laws, especially the British Laws, were overtly punitive and suspicious to the carrier and his representative. Any small mistake in declarations was severely punished. At times the cargo along with the ship was confiscated. Those were the semi-dark ages and those were the dark rules. 

In this context, our laws stink of that era. The carrier is fully held responsible for omission of  an insignificant content in it's declarations and penalized disproportionate to the spirit of of the contents. Our Laws hold the carrier for all wrongs, while pretending that the receiver or shipper don't exist. In US, you have a declaration, before the cargo is loaded in the port of loading, eliminating the chance of wrong cargo coming into the country in the first place. But in our country, even banned or prohibited cargo sneaks in. And then the carrier is penalized with rule books, stinking of repressive rules and regulations of the British colonial era. In more pragmatic countries like Singapore, carrier makes no declarations at all. The receiver does this from the contents of the BL issued by the carrier. In India, essentially though the contents of the BL are considered paramount, but the duplications of the contents in many points makes this process utterly complex and prone to delays, corruption, and costly. In Malaysia, they have a simple online system where the data is shared by many departments. The officials are practical and don't have the interest or inclination to strictly match the "t'' to a "t'' or interpret the  rule books esoterically with many different versions like they do in our country.

We are crying for corruption to end. But unless our rule books are burnt and new-age rules are in place, this would be a tall demand. In fact the inertia is terrifying. It's widely believed that the old rules are kept preserved because it serves the officials to exercise unlimited power without accountability. And therefore fuel the juggernaut of corruption to thump on our progress for a long time. It's time, we look at the rule books in addition to this ugly beast of corruption and lethargy of governance.

Brgds
Capt Rath