Seeking the douse the cotton fire, the Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) on Saturday came out with the detailed guidelines and the procedure to be adopted for scrutiny and revalidation of registration certificates given to cotton exporters.
After "partially" lifting the ban on cotton exports on March 12, the government had stated the Commerce Ministry would come out with these procedures for providing registration for outward shipments. It was decided not to wait for the meeting of the Group of Ministers and go ahead with the guidelines to put to rest any kind of speculation on this front.
The DGFT said that applications for scrutiny and revalidation would be for only registration certificates (RCs) that were valid as on March 5, 2012. "Applications are submitted to concerned registration authority, where RC was obtained. Separate application shall be made for each valid RC. Last date for submission of application (is) March 22," the guidelines said.
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The applicant would have to specify the quantum that it has already exported against a RC, with details of date of export, invoice amount and details of importer. It said that scrutiny of documents would be undertaken at the DGFT office in Delhi and then respective RAs would revalidate the RCs as per DGFT’s instructions. This decision on revalidation was taken at the meeting of GoM on March 9 after the Agriculture Minister, Sharad Pawar protested to the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh complaining that the Commerce Ministry had kept him in the dark about imposition of a ban on export of cotton.
Some Chief Ministers, including those from Congress-ruled Maharashtra and BJP-ruled Gujarat, had also conveyed their resentment over the move, stating it would hurt the interests of the farmers.