NEW DELHI: The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) has informed the trade that implementation date of Sea Cargo Manifest and Transhipment Regulations, 2018 (SCMT) in India has been postponed for a further period of not less than 3 months. As per the Notification No. 17 /2019-Customs (N.T.) New Delhi, dated 27th February 2019, informed that the SCMT implementation date has been deferred to 1st August, 2019.

 

Under the revised mandate, carriers are required to submit manifest data in an electronic format and considerably prior to a vessel’s arrival at or departure from Indian Ports. Import general manifests (IGMs) must be filed prior to the vessel departing from the last foreign port of call, while export general manifests (EGMs) need to be submitted prior to the vessel sailing from the Indian Port of loading. Currently, IGMs are generally filed 48 hours before vessel arrival for long-haul voyages and about 10 hours prior for short-haul routes, such as feeder and coastal services.  For EGMs, carriers currently have three days for online filings and seven days for manual submissions from the vessel sailing time.

 

In fact the Customs reforms complement various initiatives of digitization and other pro-trade efforts India has rolled out, not only to shore up supply chain efficiency, but also to target potentially risky shipments for safety and security screening. Those efforts include deploying a radio-frequency identification (RFID)-enabled self-sealing method for factory-packed export shipments, restricting dwell times for export-import cargo to 24 hours, and increasing shipper participation in direct port delivery (DPD) and direct port entry (DPE) services among others.