After crossing $30 billion for seven consecutive months, India’s merchandise exports hit domestically in the first 10 days of this month – with online certificate of origin (COO) for each outbound consignment from November 1. A new system for issuance is mandatory. Exporters have been put in trouble.
Many small exporters are facing challenges in registering on the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) portal, which requires high quality digital signature certificates, with many reporting outages on the portal which was earlier used only Issuance of COO for shipment to countries with which India had a preferential trade agreement,
“For the last four days, we have been trying to register on the platform and issue a COO for a consignment,” said a Mumbai-based exporter, adding that the process used to take very less time earlier. “It used to take an hour through the state industry chamber and other agencies that were allowed to issue certificates,” he said, raising concerns that their shipments even reached the destination port before the certificates were generated. could reach.
The government said the move was to improve ease of doing business in line with its ‘Digital India’ focus, but industry bodies in several states have expressed concerns with its implementation. Most critically, existing export facilitation intermediaries such as Custom House Agents (CHAs), who handle most of the export paperwork, are not able to share data on behalf of the exporters, as DGFT has shared APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). not done. new system.
API-sharing system
“For CoWin and Aadhaar, we have an API-sharing system so that information can be shared. Unfortunately, this feature is not there and we have flagged the issue but have not received any favorable response,” said an industry representative.
The Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which oversees the DGFT, which is entrusted with the formulation and implementation of the foreign trade policy, informed Hindu That the online COO portal had a simple registration process and its design allowed the lead user or exporter to grant access rights to other secondary users such as the CHA.
The ministry did not respond to a question whether API-sharing was being considered, but said 85 agencies are ‘now enabled on the portal’.
On difficulties faced by exporters in registering in the online system, the ministry said: “Based on our experience with the preferential exporter community, no issues have been reported on this account.”
“It is not an easy process at all. Many exporters are facing issues and we have sent emails to DGFT and made calls to their call centers but to no avail,” said one exporter, adding that this problem is specifically Small towns and cities are critical for micro, small and medium exporters.
separate payment
Even large exporters, with multiple shipments at a time, are facing challenges due to a norm that prescribes separate payment for each certificate issued. “Issues relating to payment of bulk duty etc. are areas which may be looked into in a phased manner depending upon the extent of interest shown by various users,” the ministry said.
Federation of Indian Exporters Organization said that the new digital portal is a step in the right direction which will address many concerns of the exporters and importing countries, initial challenges need to be addressed and API integration will allow faster on-boarding. facility will be available. Export community in the new system.
The ministry said over seven lakh preferential COOs have been issued through the online DGFT portal since its launch in September 2019. With the need for all merchant exporters to now use a single platform, the volume that can be handled by the portal has increased. When asked whether the capacity of the portal has been increased accordingly, the ministry said that the portal has scalability and is hosted on cloud servers.
“All IT systems being dynamic in nature, can be tweaked to accommodate larger concerns of most of the users based on exporter feedback. In fact, several changes were implemented as recently as October 2021 based on the feedback of the exporters and the user experience of the authorized agencies,” it said.
President of Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, Nashik-based Santosh Mandlecha told Hindu That exporters, including those dealing with consignments of perishable agricultural produce, were facing challenges since November 1 due to myriad reasons, including difficulties in registering their digital signatures on the DGFT portal.
“Online certificate is a good idea but the government should consider allowing both offline certificate and online certificate till the on-boarding challenges are resolved. We have been taking up this issue with the ministry for the past few months.
Earlier this year, DGFT announced through a trade notice that the system of issuance of electronic COO is being expanded to cover certificates for non-preferential trading as well. On October 18, after extending the implementation timeline twice, the DGFT said that the offline COO issuance system would not be extended beyond October 31.
“Several workshops were conducted to sensitize and handle the specified agencies and on their request, the date of implementation has already been extended twice to include most of the agencies on the COO platform,” the ministry said. .
‘Adds credibility’
“This online facility provides ‘ease of doing business’ to the exporting community and provides a verifiable authentication mechanism to the participating countries to verify the genuineness of the COO issued through a QR code that is Adds credibility to the ECOO issued.”
With a “Digital India” focus, paperless filing is required at most export interfaces, including at Customs, for which a Digital Signature Certificate is a pre-requisite. The common platform will not only help in providing paperless facility to the exporter but also help in weeding out the ‘fraudulent’ certificates which are reported from time to time.
“The Department of Commerce, to take forward the ‘Business Facilitation’ initiatives, envisages the implementation of all its processes with a complete IT implementation and the expansion of the ECOO portal for non-preferential certificates of origin is a step in the same direction. In addition, the analysis generated on ‘basic’ based information can become an important component in our decision making and help us in our FTA negotiations and more informed export planning,” the ministry emphasized.
,