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T.E. Raja Simhan

Chennai May 5 The Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) is revamping its information technology infrastructure in all the three departments (Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax) at a cost of over Rs 500 crore, according to a department official.

Under the `Consolidation of Server Project,' it is proposed that all computing resources and application software of CBEC would operate out of a National Data Centre and would be reached to users through a nation wide area network (WAN), said Mr Yashodhan Parande, Director General of Systems (Customs and Central Excise).

There will be a disaster recovery site to ensure availability of services in the event of failure of the National Data Centre.

All enterprise-wide applications will be operated and managed out of the centre, and around 580 department offices would be networked through WAN, he told Business Line on the sidelines of a seminar on `Facilitation in Logistics' organised by the Chennai Custom House Agents Association last week.

"The project was initiated to help CBEC provide world-class services in the changing technology environment to clients such as exporters, importers and passengers," he said.

In the Customs, at present the CBEC operates a distributed application for implementing its automated Customs clearance called the Indian Customs EDI System (called ICES 1.0).

The ICES is the back-end application software, which is supported by a centrally hosted infrastructure application called ICEGATE, which acts as the EDI and eCommerce gateway for handling EDI messaging.

Additionally, for EDI partners such as banks and custodians located within the local Customs facility, there is a collection of IT infrastructure elements called the Message Exchange Servers, which are required for staging incoming and outgoing EDI messages meant for ICES.

Upon the full implementation of the centralised software (ICES 1.5), all messaging will be handled centrally by ICEGATE, says the tender document issued for the project.

More Stories on : Excise and Customs | E-Governance

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