MANGALORE: How long does it take for union ministry of commerce to act on a memorandum presented to it? If union minister for railways D V Sadananda Gowda's past experience is to be believed, not less than eight to 10 months in most cases. However, a change of regime at New Delhi has brought about a change to all this and recent case of The Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Co-operative (Campco) Ltd is proof of this.
A high powered delegation of Campco Ltd that Gowda led to Nirmala Sitharaman, union minister for state for commerce (independent charge) on August 11 had urged her to revise the specified tariff value of areca nut. The Director-General of Foreign Trade on August 14 issued order raising the specified tariff value for arecanut from the existing Rs 110/kg to Rs 170/kg, in less than three days. "This is Modi effect in Delhi," Gowda avers.
Citing from his own personal experience at Rail Bhavan, Gowda says, "No file is left pending with me for more than a week. In case, technical inputs or legal issues are to be addressed, a file is disposed off in 10-days at the most." This working culture has rubbed off on even the commerce ministry, Gowda averred adding that it is almost unprecedented that commerce ministry had acted with such alacrity in the past as it did in Campco's case.
Incidentally, the commerce ministry had fixed minimum price for import of arecanut at Rs 110/kg in May 2013. Campco in its memorandum had informed Nirmala that off late, arecanut worth $46.135 million has been imported in to India from Bangladesh and private traders have siphoned in an equal quantity of arecanut in to the country from porous borders of Bangladesh and Nepal, thereby reducing the rate of domestic areca nut.
Campco informed the commerce minister that based on scientific evaluation of cost of production by T N Prakash Kammaradi, chairman, Karnataka Agriculture Price Commission, the average cost of cultivation for the crop season 2012-13 worked out to be more than Rs 170/kg and that cost of cultivation in 2013-14 would be higher. Based on this, Campco made its request which the commerce ministry acceded through
DGFT in three-days.
Source : timesofindia.indiatimes.com