Circular No. :467/94/2001-Cus.V Dated : 26/9/2001

IMMEDIATE/TIME BOUND

F.No.467/94/2001-Cus.V

Government of India

Ministry of finance

Department of Revenue

(Central Board of Excise and Customs)

Dated, 26th September, 2001.

To

Chief Commissioner of Customs and Excise (all)

Commissioner of Customs Excise (all)

Sub:NATIAONAL IMPORT DATA BASE PROJECT

Sir,

It has been decided to electronically capture import data from all the customs stations in the country and transmit the same to a central serve in the Directorate of Valuation on daily basis, where the same would be consolidated, analysed and a feed back would be generated and set to the chief commissioners/commissioners/Customs stations indicating averages, upper and lower limits and international prices. The project requires active participation of all the customs stations and local initiative in capturing the data, sending to the central server and receiving/storing/using the feedback on the return stream. To make the task easy for all concerned, a simplified data format, with only a few essential data fields, has been chosen as at Annexure-A.

2. The Project will be implemented in phases. Phase I will be to capture data from

EDI processed Bills of Entry from the 13 Customs Stations (list at Annexure B) where V-sat facility has been provided. These Customs station, where EDI systems is in operation, may use a program written and circulated by NIC to extract the data fields from the EDI database directly. The subsequent phases will involve data capture of manually processed Bills of Entry of these 13 stations as well as the EDI and the non EDI data from other stations through out the country. Detailed instructions in this regard will be issued subsequently.

3. The data requires to be generated with reference to the assessment date so that

both declared values and assessed value are captured. These values as well as maximum retail price, where declared, should be given in Indian Rupees only for ease of comparison and calculation of unit values. Field staff entering data may kindly be encouraged to capture data for the two fields Model/specification/grade” and Brand” to enable meaningful comparison. For warehoused goods, data relating to into Bond Bills of Entry only need to be captured. To avoid duplication, data relating to ex-bond Bill of Entry should not be captured. In regard to HS code, the six digit Customs Tariff Sub-Heading (CTH) may be entered followed by two zeroes.

4. Data retrieved/captured should be sent electronically to the Directorate of

Valuation. The data should be sent on a daily basis as end of day operations (EOD) through V-sat with the help of local NIC experts.

5. The Directorate of Valuation with the help of NCST experts will merage the data

and carry out the analysis to provide additional information, international prices etc., and convert the data into excel format. The analysed data in excel format would then be transmitted to the 13 Customs Stations on a weekly basis through V-Sat. As the analysed data generated by the Directorate of Valuation is voluminous,the entire data cannot be transmitted to other Customs station (not connected by V-Sat) by e-mail.Therefore only selected data (E.g. sensitive commodities) will be transmitted as e-mail attachment through the Global e-mail network. For this purpose the Customs stations should intimate the e-mail addresses to the Directorate of Valuation at: directorate[dot]valuation[at]doc[dot]gov[dot]in.

6. All Customs stations/Commissioners/Chief Commissioners may kindly make

arrangement to install separate, PCs with MS Office (including Excel) with sufficient memory for storage of data for 90 days received from the Directorate of Valuation. Action is also being taken to upload the entire data on the website of the Directorate of Valuation (www.dov.gov.in) for access through password facility.

7. Arrangement should be made to make the relevant portion of the feedback

available to the assessing officers. In respect of minor Customs Stations, it shall be the responsibility in Commissionerate headquarters to redistribute the data by e-mail or floppy for use by assessing officers. Action should also be taken urgently to review the assessments if the feedback indicates lower assessment at a particular station. The declared values should be critically examined if they are lower compared to the average values or international prices, by invoking provisions of Rule 10A and the newly amended provisions of the Custom Valuation Rules (Notfn. No. 41/2001-NT-customs dt. 7.9.01).

8. Any difficulties experienced in this regard may please be brought to the notice of

the Board and the Directorate of Valuation. The following deadlines have been set for implementation of the first phase of the NIDB project:-

11. i)Despatch of NIC software to the 13 Customs stations connected by V-Sat-11.10.2001.
12. ii)Experimental Data transmissions from all the 13 Customs stations- 15.10.2001.

iii)Experimental transmissions of feedback by Directorate of Valuation by Sat-19.10.2001.

29. iv)Experimental transmission of analysed data by e-mail to all major customs stations and Commissionerate Hqrs. Through global E-mail Network 29.10.2001.
30. v)Regular transmission of data and feedback 5.11.2001.
31. It is requested that these deadlines may please be strictly adhered to.

Yours faithfully,

Sd/-

(P.C. JHA)

1. SECRETARY (CUSTOMS)