In the wake of investors not finding a grievance redressal system for their complaints pertaining to special economic zones (SEZ), the department of commerce is drafting orientation modules for officials in the customs department.
The module will train officials from various departments on the overall economy and the broad role of exports especially SEZs and export oriented units (EOU). The 1-2 hour sessions will start from January next year in seven government SEZs and then expanded to other zones.
?Customs officials have no idea of SEZs because they are not familiar with the issues and the orientation modules will be taken to other departments like DGFT, revenue, environment and sales tax, among others,? said a commerce department official.
In fact, the commerce ministry is working with the Export Promotion Council for EOUs and SEZs to prepare ?EPCES Online? system, where SEZ developers and units can post their operational grievances will be addressed in the shortest possible time.
?The grievance database will be fed into this module in the next one month or so. The modules will be based on that and we plan to develop sector specific modules post that,? the official added.
The need for such training modules has become pressing as the number of SEZ de-notifications have increased substantially in the last three months.
Till now, 576 SEZs have been approved out of which 392 have been notified. A total of 173 SEZs have commenced export, of which 20 are multi-product SEZs.
Till July 31, 2013, 58 have been denotified, most of which have happened in the last two years because of the imposition of MAT and DDT.
In the last four months, majors like Reliance, Parsvnath and Kalyani Group, among others have denotified their SEZs, thereby releasing more than 1,300 hectare of land.
