CBIC issues revised guidelines for reporting arrest, smuggling incidents
New Delhi (PTI): The Central Board Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) has revised guidelines for reporting of arrests, smuggling and commercial frauds by customs officers, as it looks to enhance risk-based targeting to nullify fraud attempts by syndicates.
In an instruction to field officers, the CBIC said that the arrest and incident reports of smuggling and commercial frauds are not being shared or are sporadically shared by the customs zones.
In some cases, the arrest report many times contains description/details that are insufficient as input for enhanced risk profiling.
As per the revised guidelines of CBIC, the Chief Commissioner/Director Generals of a customs zone would be required to send the arrest report through email to the CBIC within 24 hours of the arrest of an individual.
The arrest report would contain details of nationality and the details of offence committed by the individual who has been arrested. It would also contain details of seizure of goods by the authorities in quantity as well as in terms of market value.
In cases where arrests have not been made by the Customs officer, an incident report related to smuggling and commercial frauds has to be sent "immediately" to the CBIC by the jurisdictional Commissioner.
Observing that customs commissioners are "expected to be up to date" with respect to smuggling and commercial fraud cases under his/her jurisdiction, the CBIC said the incident report should describe the modus operandi, including flight/ voyage/cruise number and the customs declaration document name.
The report should also mention the country of origin of the goods and the duty involved.
"The collection and integration of a proper database is very much required for the purpose of prevention of smuggling through early detection of entities involved and by understanding their adjusting modus operandi.
"The expeditious updating of databases is imperative for achieving the optimum risk based targeting across zones. This agility nullifies tactics that the syndicates adopt across zones or modes of carriage or routes," the CBIC instructions said.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
