India's trade hurdle: Bureaucrats unchecked, entrepreneurs unheard

Last week, Wintrack, a firm based in Tamil Nadu, said it is halting its imports and exports business because of corruption and relentless harassment by the Chennai Customs, who denied the allegations. The government has ordered an investigation. Yet, few believe the denial — after all, most exporters and importers acknowledge that ‘speed money’ through intermediaries is a routine cost of doing business. These developments reminded me of a young woman entrepreneur whose ordeal captures the deep flaws in our trade ecosystem.

 

The entrepreneur filed her shipping bill for export of certain goods she had been exporting for years. But her consignment was blocked when a Customs officer arbitrarily alleged that the item was prohibited and ordered testing in a government-approved laboratory. The officer ignored test reports from a private laboratory that she presented, her pleas about urgent buyer requirements, and her warnings that delays would mean mounting demurrage and contractual penalties. Even after vigorous follow-up, it took three days for the Customs to just send the samples for testing.

 

She then escalated the matter to senior officers in the Customs House — citing government instructions that exports should not be detained, and that goods sent for testing must be cleared within three days. But her appeals were met with shrugs of helplessness. In desperation, she wrote to the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, the finance minister, and even the Prime Minister’s Office, begging for intervention. Nothing moved until 16 days later, when test results arrived confirming that the goods were not prohibited, something she had been saying from the beginning.

 

By then, airport demurrage charges had ballooned. Even the customs detention certificate failed to persuade airport staff to grant relief. After escalating the matter to the airport’s top management, she secured a waiver of demurrage. The consignment was finally shipped 25 days after the shipping bill was filed.

 

Throughout this ordeal, her buyer was agitated, pressing relentlessly for shipment. “The emotional toll was crushing because I was under immense financial and reputational pressure,” she recalls. At one breaking point, she confronted a senior Customs officer: “Aap batayie main kya karoon. Zeher pee loon?” (“You tell me what to do. Drink poison?”).

 

This is not an isolated story. It is a mirror to how fragile our trade facilitation claims really are. An honest exporter, with proper documentation, was reduced to humiliation and despair, while the officer who triggered the ordeal faces no consequence.

 

To be fair, the government has introduced several progressive measures — self-assessment, digitalisation, faceless assessment, e-sanchit and so on. But these facilitations collapse when an individual officer misuses discretionary power. The official line is that such cases are “rare”. The reality is that they are rare only because most exporters quietly comply with “informal costs”. Few dare to resist. Fewer still risk going public, fearing retribution. 

If India aspires to be a developed country, it cannot afford even such rare cases of bungling. The Wintrack case gives an opportunity for introspection at the top levels of the government. Merely blaming the complainant does not inspire any confidence. Trade facilitation cannot just be about portals and procedures. It must be about accountability also. Unless individual officers are held answerable for harassment, honest entrepreneurs will continue to feel that the bureaucrats gang up to protect their own rather than be fair and reasonable with the trade.  

Email: tncrajagopalan@gmail.com