Home > Fabrics & Garments > Full Story

Govt urged to maintain status quo on ICD

PTI - Coimbatore

The Tirupur Exporters’ Association (TEA) has appealed for maintenance of status quo in the case of export of goods under various schemes like DEPB from internal container depots (ICDs) to the gateway ports of Tuticorin and Kochi.

The recent customs notification that exports of ICD shipments would be permitted only through sea-ports at Mumbai, Nhava Sheva, Kandla, Chennai and Kolkata had put exporters to untold hardships, TEA said at a post-exim policy exporters’ meet at Chennai recently.

In a release here, the association said exporters had already made arrangements to ship their goods through the Tuticorin port which was nearer to Tirupur and to take the Chennai route would result in increased transaction costs. Exporters were already facing problems on various fronts and this would raise the manufacturing cost heavily, besides eroding the margin, resulting in unremunerative business.

Buyers nominate Tuticorin as a terminal port through which goods had to be dispatched, with a mother vessel calling and sailing directly to the US, TEA said adding the transship period from feeder to mother vessel took a day at Tuticorin, while it took seven days in Chennai.

Since there was no mother vessel connectivity at Chennai, the goods had to be dispatched 72 hours before the departure of the steamer, TEA observed. It also requested the commerce ministry to make available the benefit of importing packaging materials under three per cent embellishment scheme to the textile and garment industry.