Manual amendment of shipping bills allows transmission to DGFT for MEIS claim processing where reward marking was inadvertently omitted.

Petition concerns entitlement to MEIS benefits where shipping bills omitted electronic marking of the reward column; legal point: administrative minutes permit exceptional manual amendment of shipping bills from 'N' to 'Y' and require Customs to transmit corrected bills to DGFT via ICEGATE for processing under MEIS; factual basis: petitioner contemporaneously indicated intention to claim and omission was inadvertent; operative effect: court directed manual correction, transmission and processing of the MEIS claims as exceptional administrative relief in favour of the petitioner.

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Issues: Whether the petitioner, who exported goods and mistakenly did not mark the reward column electronically for claiming benefits under the Merchandise Export from India Scheme (MEIS) framed under Chapter 3 of the Foreign Trade Policy, is entitled to MEIS benefits by permitting manual correction and transmission of the shipping bills to DGFT for processing.

Analysis: The Court examined the petitioner's claim for MEIS benefits under Chapter 3 of the Foreign Trade Policy where the electronic files for 97 shipping bills were not transmitted to DGFT because the reward column was not marked 'Y' at the time of electronic filing. The Court considered the minutes of a meeting of concerned officers (referred to in a prior order) which recorded that, in exceptional cases, Customs undertakes manual amendments of shipping bills from 'N' to 'Y' under the procedure involving Section 149 of the Customs Act and that such manual amendments require Customs to transmit corrected shipping bills to the DGFT server by manual intervention at ICEGATE so that DGFT may process the claims as exceptional cases. The petitioner had contemporaneously indicated intention to claim MEIS benefits and the failure to mark the electronic option was found to be inadvertent. The Court treated the earlier administrative decision and the minutes as a basis for granting the same exceptional administrative relief and directed manual transmission by Customs and processing by DGFT within specified timelines.

Conclusion: The petitioner is entitled to have the shipping bills manually corrected and transmitted to DGFT and to have the MEIS claim processed; relief is granted in favour of the petitioner.

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