2001 (10) TMI 136

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.... The entry exempted from duty all formulations based on the list of bulk drugs specified in the First Schedule to the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 1987 as amended from time to time. These three were listed as bulk drugs, to be used in the National Tuberculosis Eradication Programme, in the First Schedule to the Drugs (Prices Control) Order. Rifampicin at the relevant time was partially exempted from duty by Notification 30/88. 2. Tuberculosis patients derive greater benefit from treatment by combination of the drugs used, than from treatment by a single medicine. The Office Memorandum dated 4-7-1995 of the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers of Government of India explains that, in order to maintain the continuity and regularity of in....

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....port their conclusion. This note provides, in relation to drugs under Heading 30.03, that "conversion of powder into tablets or capsules, labelling or relabelling of containers intended for consumers and repacking from bulk packs to retail packs or the adoption of any other treatment to render the products marketable to the consumer, shall amount to manufacture". The argument, although not clearly expressed, appear to be that as a result of packing two or three separate medicaments together, a new product emerges, which is not covered by the exemption contained in neither of the two notifications and is therefore liable to duty. 5. The Assistant Commissioner and the Commissioners (Appeals) both have explained how the processes that the a....

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.... to Chapter 33. Since each of the products was marketable on its own, putting them all together did not confer on them any attribute of marketability that it did not possess earlier. Each of the tablets continued to have a separate identity, which was not submerged in the new identity that the assembling of combination of tablets acquired. Such a combination did not in fact require any identity. It was, very simply, a matter of convenience for the customers. 6. It is also relevant to note that these four or three tablets were initially packed, after their manufacture into this combination packing. It is not as if they were first packed into separate packing and thereafter drawn from this packing and put into the packing presently under c....