An initiative of NATIONAL INTERNET EXCHANGE OF INDIA & DIGITAL EMPOWERMENT FOUNDATION

ICEGATE Upgrade Project

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Description

ICEGATE (Indian Customs EDI Gateway) is the e-commerce portal of the Indian Customs. ICEGATE portal (url –http://icegate.gov.in/)services are widely used by Trade Partners which includes Importers/ Exporters/ Shipping lines/ Shipping Agents/ Airlines/ Air Cargo Agents/ Air Cargo Custodians/ Train Operators/ Inland Cargo Depot Custodians/ Container Freight Station Custodians / Commercial Banks and several other agencies who transact on ICEGATE for EXIM Purposes. ICEGATE portal provides services for Customs clearance of import/ export goods in transparent as well as efficient manner leading to reduction of transaction costs. These services include electronic filing of Bills of Entry (Import Goods Declaration); Shipping Bills (Export Goods Declaration); Cargo Manifest declarations such as Import General Manifest (IGM), Export General Manifest (EGM) etc.; and Customs Duty Payment in the form of electronic messages for Customs clearance over the internet. ICEGATE is a critical application in as much as 12.55 Million documents filed in 2010-11 i.e. almost 83% of all imports/ exports documents are filed in Customs through ICEGATE. It also provides e-payment facility for Customs Duty payment as well as electronic disbursal of export incentives such as Duty Drawback in any bank account of the exporter across India. In 2010-11, Customs duty amounting to Rs. 2700 cr. was collected through e-Payment facility on ICEGATE. The ICEGATE accepts documents for any Customs Location in EDI on anywhere – any time basis. ICEGATE services are now operational for 97 major customs locations handling nearly 98% of India International trade in terms of import and export consignments. Besides transactional services, ICEGATE also provides real time document tracking facilities for the Trade Partners and data is also exchanged with various other regulatory and licensing agencies in other ministries of Govt of India such as DGFT, RBI, Ministry of Steel and DGCI&S. The National Import database (NIDB) and Export Commodity Database (ECDB) for Directorate of Valuation, Customs and Central Excise are also being serviced through ICEGATE. All the services on ICEGATE are free of charge. The target beneficiaries of ICEGATE include 6.72 lac importers/ Exporters, 9000 Customs House Agents, 10000 CBEC officers, and about 800 institutional Trade Partners. Acceptability of the ICEGATE can be gauged from the fact that the portal receives 7.49 Million hits per day and expected to cross about 2000 billion hits in 2011-12. ICEGATE was awarded Gold Award in the Best Government Portal category for 2011 at the 14th National e-Governance Conference held at Aurangabad. It has also been awarded SKOCH Digital Inclusion Award for 2011. Detailed write up on the ICEGATE, its services, the impact on trade and government and other aspects is enclosed as Annexure I..

What do we deliver?

The ICEGATE portal provides host of end to end services for Customs EDI which include: Electronic filing of Customs documents such as Bills of Entry (Import Goods Declaration); Shipping Bills (Export Goods Declaration); Cargo Manifest declarations such as Import General Manifest (IGM), Export General Manifest (EGM) etc. Customs Duty Payment challan transmission to bank from Customs e-Payment facility for Customs Duty payment by guiding the Customers to secure payment gateway and integrating the Customs Duty Payment particulars in Customs application Electronic disbursal of export incentives such as Duty Drawback in any bank account of the exporter across India. Query reply to the Customs through internet during Customs document processing. Real time document tracking facilities for the Trade Partners Data exchange with various regulatory and licensing agencies in other ministries of Govt of India such as DGFT, RBI, Ministry of Steel and DGCI&S. Code lists, directories relevant for EDI filing are also hosted on ICEGATE. Links to important facilities such as error codes pertaining to EDI filing, Remote EDI System (RES) package etc. is also available on the ICEGATE.

Whom we deliver?

The ICEGATE upgrade project, as already discussed at Para 7 above, covers the EDI needs of EXIM Trade, and is used by a number of trade partners. These services are used by them at 97 Customs EDI locations covering 98% of the India Foreign Trade. The broad categories of Trade Partners using the ICEGATE Services are as follows: a) Importers/ Exporters b) Customs House Agents c) Airlines, Air Cargo Agents, Air Consol Agents d) Shipping Lines, Shipping Agents, Consol Agents e) Air Custodians such as DIAL, MIAL, AAI etc. f) Sea Port Authorities/ Sea Custodians such as Mumbai Port Trust, JNPT, Mundra Port Trust etc. g) ICD & CFS Custodians such as CWC, PSWC, CONCOR, RAJSICO, ACTL etc. h) Transport Agencies such as CONCOR, GRFL etc. i) Banks collecting Customs Duty and disbursing the Duty Drawback j) Institutions such as Director General of Foreign Trade issuing IMPEX Licences RBI Director General of Commercial Intelligence & Statistics Directorate of Valuation Directorate of Revenue Intelligence.

How is the project unique?

The highlights or the unique features of the Initiative have been explained in the write up above. However, some of them are repeated below for the sake of ready reference: a. Single Window for document filing and message exchange with Trade Partners for ICES. Online Registration of Trade Partner with facility to file document and message exchange with acknowledgement. b. Bringing Stakeholders on common platform and data Integration with Customs through messages despite different systems. c. Meeting data needs of various Govt Agencies across ministries seamlessly d. Complete real time tracking of the documents not only at ICEGATE/ICES end but their status vis-a-vis message exchange with trade partner. e. Automated electronic communication with the banks for duty collection and export incentive disbursal. f. Automated electronic communication with Director General of Foreign Trade office for exchange of Shipping Bill Data, IEC Data and Licence data and its integration with ICES and to make it available for all the ports in EDI. g. Ease and Flexibility to trade in document filing 24X Basis, for any location, from anywhere using multiple communication mode and multiple EDI language formats h. Making Customs Ready for 24X7 working.

Roadmap

The ICEGATE in the coming months is going to implement the following initiatives: Implementation of Sandesh, the SMS based update on the status of the Customs clearance document. The facility would cover the status of documents on demand basis as well as on regular subscription basis indicating the status of the document in the queue as and when it changes. Implementation of Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) at the Airports by way of data exchange with the immigration authorities, the airlines and other different agencies regarding the alerts made available with reference to passenger movement. Implementation of pre arrival Customs export data exchange with Foreign Customs Administrations for facilitation as well as risk management based targeting of import goods consignments. Implementation of about 100 more messages with various Trade Partners which have been identified and developed post implementation of ICEGATE upgrade project to reduce paper further in Customs working. Bringing the mandatory clearances from Other Governmental Agencies such as laboratory test results, phyto-sanitary clearances etc. into EDI, which are still not on EDI. Making interaction with Institutional Trade Partners completely paperless.

Contact

Directorate General of Systems & Data Management,Central Board of Excise & Customs
1. Atul Dikshit 2. Dheeraj Rastogi
4th & 5th Floor, Hotel Samrat, Vinay Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021
URL/Website – http://icegate.gov.in/`

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