FEBRUARY 15, 2015

By R Subramanya, Advocate

WORLD over, business documents, like contracts, invoices, packing lists, are made on a crisp and impressive paper, and printed with a fine ink, intending to leave a long lasting impression pride on the person holding it.

Coming to our ‘Made in India' documents, even the most important documents like bill of entry and the shipping bill is even today being printed by the Customs authorities on one of the worst papers available in the market, and printed by an antique and mostly forgotten dot matrix printers across the EDI customs houses.

It has been the grievance of every importer/exporter/manufacturer that the quality of the printing is so poor that even the Central Excise authorities are denying credit on such bill of entry as the document is not legible or dishevelled & mutilated.

The shipping bills are one of the crucial documents which are required for export assessment, refunds, rebates, banking realisations and proof of export, if not anything else. Take one or two photocopies and that poor document will pray for freedom.

Take any bill of entry or a shipping bill, and you find that reading the bill of entry or such shipping bill will require a certain amount of intelligence quotient, expertise and cleverness. Your staff needs to be trained as to how to correlate the headers with the figures written below.

Imports brings in lots of customs duties and exports brings in huge foreign exchanges. But the basic documents which are the only evidence for such transactions, have no one to look into improvising their quality of life.

Bills of entry and the shipping bills are mighty and powerful, but appear like a cheap quality of tissue paper. Even some of the tissue papers, used in hotels and airports would be of better quality than the paper being used for the most important business transactions with other countries, and also based on which we all are dreaming of take this proud nation to the echelons of prosperity and get rid of poverty.

Looking at the poor document, we normally handle it with care, and have some cellotapes pasted at the back side of each fold it braves. But, when we are looking at Pravasi Bharati divas, Vibrant Gujarat, Make in India campaigns, and thousands of crores of rupees spent for makeover of the country's poor image, why should the damn poor document be left out without any attention in terms of quality.

... before parting - The authorities who are responsible for such poor quality of paper and worst quality of printing of such crucial documents must be punished for tarnishing the image of the country, when we are trying to project ourselves as the best nation with the youngest workforce. We don't require an Obama to ask ourselves "Can we do it?".