TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
1982 (12) TMI 50
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....ation under which exemption from duty has been granted to viscose staple fibres. 3. In this country we now have various duties of customs, called basic duty, additional duty, auxiliary duty and surcharge. The first two alone are in point for the present discussion. The Customs Act, 1962 deals with Customs duty proper, which people refer to as the basic duty. The Customs Act is a permanent Code for the Customs. It establishes the administrative hierarchy for the management of duties of customs; it lays down the assessment procedure; it contains enforcement provisions, such as, penalties and prosecutions, and confiscation of contraband; it also provides for exemptions, etc. and, perhaps most important of all, the Act also lays down or decl....
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....anual. For this section adopts, as the rates of additional duty, the very rates of Central excise leviable on like goods locally manufactured. The intention obviously is to afford a degree or protection to the local manufacturer by loading the imported variety with an additional import duty. With the charge to additional duty laid down in this fashion, the Customs Tariff Act proceeds to adopt the whole gamut of the provisions in the Customs Act for effectuating that charge. See Section 3(6) of the Customs Tariff Act. 4. For those who read the Customs Act, therefore, the Customs Tariff Act is compulsive reading. Otherwise, we would not know that goods are dutiable, and how much duty such goods would have to pay. For those who read the Cus....
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....ssary because additional duty is a different duty from the basic duty. 7. Having regard to the statutory power of exemption, its scope and the manner of its exercise, it is in every case, a matter of construction of the concerned notification issued by the Central Government as to what the coverage of the exemption is; whether it is confined to the basic duty alone, or the countervailing duty alone, or both. 8. The text of the Central Government's notification in this case is as under :- "215/80-Cus., dated 1-11-1980. - In exercise of the powers conferred by sub-section (1) of Section 25 of the Customs Act, 1962 (52 of 1962) the Central Government being satisfied that it is necessary in the public interest so to do, exempts viscose....
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....ds. 9. Mr. K.N. Balasubramaniam, learned Counsel for the Customs department, said that in drawing up the notification for exemption it has always been the practice of the Central Government to take care to particularise what precisely is the kind of duty with reference to which exemption is being granted. The department's counter affidavit carries some illustrative examples showing this practice. We are not surprised that this precaution is taken in the wording of the notification what with the variety of customs duties in the filed. It is true that the notification in this case does not say or indicate that `basic duty' alone is the subject of exemption. Nor does it expressly exclude the additional duty from the purview of the exemption....