Ahmedabad: The cases of smuggling through ports in India by means of ‘misdeclaration’ would completely end in around two and a half years, Chairman, Federation of Freight Forwarders’ Associations in India, Samir J Shah said today.

Addressing a press conference here Shah, also praised the union government for its efforts to streamline the export and import procedure in India and for proper implementation of Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), which according to him was likely to increase India’s share in world export by over three folds to 6% in 4 to 5 years from less than two percent currently.

Shah said that the mis-declaration based smuggling which was a major source of smuggled goods (around 3 to 4% of the imported consignments), would be a matter of past in two to two and a half years as the government would by then make all the cargo scanned by high quality scanners.

‘It won’t be possible to smuggle anything by means of mis-declaration as all the cargo booked will be scanned with high quality scanners, many of which cost around 70 to 80 crores a piece. There were also such scanners which are capable of scanning with high precision a train load of goods in a matter of minutes,’ he said.

Shah, however, said that the second way of smuggling which was completely illegal and was completely done surreptitiously should be checked through other means.

Taking about TFA, which become effective from February 22 this year, for all the 181 members countries of WTO, he said that India had signed it in April last year and completed various formalities including setting up of National Committee on Trade Facilitation(NCTF) by October, 2016.

‘The political will of the government has made the bureaucracy willing and the private sector ready for the much needed reforms in export-import, logistics and other sectors’, he said.
Now many ports in the country including Nava Bandar in Mumbai and Chennai were adopting Direct Port Delivery (DPD) method in a considerable manner, in which the consignment is directly handed over to the party on the port itself.

To a query he said that the logistic sector in India would need over 2 crore people to fulfill its expanding needs in next two to three years while the Freight Forwarding segment alone which employees around 20 lakh people currently would need as many fully trained hands in next 4 to 5 years.

DeshGujarat