The judgment emphasizes the mandatory requirements under the MEIS scheme and the need for correction of shipping bills by the Customs Department before seeking relief from the DGFT.

ORDER

Vivek Rusia, J. - The petitioners have filed the present petition seeking the following relief/s :

'(i) That this Hon'ble Court be pleased to declaration relaxation/condonation of the procedure lapse of non-mentioning of MEIS scheme in the shipping bills at the time of export as arbitrary and discriminative.

(ii) That this Hon'ble Court be pleased to issue a writ of Mandamus or any other appropriate Writ, order or direction ordering and directing the Respondent No.2 by themselves, their sub ordinate servants to award the MEIS to the petitioner on export of their products through the Shipping Bills issued during 2017-18 & 2018-19.

(iii) That this Hon'ble Court be pleased to issue a writ of Mandamus or any other appropriate Writ, order or direction ordering and directing the Respondent No.5 by themselves, their sub ordinate servants to issue no objection certificate in favour of the petitioner to certify that the goods were exported by the petitioner and they have realised the export proceeds.'

1. Petitioner No.1 is a Private Limited Company having its registered office at 1003, Meadows Building, Sahar Plaza Complex, JB Nagar, Andheri (East), Mumbai and factory at 44-59, Sector D2 Industrial Area, Sanwer Road, Indore. Petitioner No.1 is engaged in the manufacture of automobile parts. Petitioner No.2 is the Executive Director of petitioner No.1 company.

2. The Government of India has introduced the Merchandise Export from India Scheme (MEIS) as a Foreign Trade Policy 201520 which has now been discontinued for the export w.e.f. 1.1.2021. Under the scheme, incentives were given to the Indian exporters in terms of Duty Credit Scrips @ 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7% of the FOB value of realized exports made during the validity period. The process of availing the aforesaid benefit is provided under the scheme itself and according to which, at the time of filing of shipping bills, if the HS Code of the exported product is under the eligible code list (Appendix 3B of MEIS) then the exporter is required to mark 'Yes' by clicking 'Y' in the rewards column of the shipping bill. All such 'Yes' marked shipping bills are transferred from the Customs Database to the DGFT database electronically. Once the payment for these shipments is realized, the exporter requests the concerned bank to generate and upload an electronic Bank Realization Certificate (eBRC) on the DGFT server. After this, for every IEC (exporter), the DGFT database has details of goods exported and the consequent realization amount. Thereafter, the exporter was required to lodge the portal where his electronic date is available to him in DGFT online repository and tag the individual shipping bills in the online application with e-BRC and an application is submitted. Under the provisions of the scheme, without electronic data of shipping bills being transmitted from the Customs server, such shipping bills are not present in the DGFT repository and a claim under MEIS cannot be applied by the exporter for the relevant shipping bills.

3. The case of the present petitioners is that as per Paragraph 3.04 of Foreign Trade Policy 2015-20 for the period from 2017-18 and 2018-19 and 2-19-20 the petitioner could not avail the benefit of MEIX due to the clerical error as they could not tick 'Y' (for Yes) in the reward column of shipping bills. Under these circumstances, the system automatically treated the shipping bills as 'N' (for No) in the reward column of the shipping bills.

4. The case of the petitioner is that during the relevant period i.e. 2015-20 the petitioner was entitled to avail the benefit of MEIS but could not avail of such benefit as did not declare the intention by ticking or marking 'Y' (for Yes) in the shipping bills. Since the aforesaid mistake was committed by several exporters, therefore, the DGFT with a view to promoting the exports from India issued Trade Notice No. 24/2018 dated 21.2.2018 asking the exporters to submit their applications in a proper format. The petitioner has a