CBEC employs Wipro for online gateway

Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC) has employed Wipro Infotech, an Indian IT company, for a contract of Rs 13.5 crore for supply, installation and commissioning of an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)/Electronic Commerce (EC) gateway-Indian Customs and Excise Gateway (ICEGATE) and Indian Customs and Excise Network (ICENET) on an turnkey basis. 

The electronic commerce gateway involves development and setting up of an EDI application at the trading gateway to enable a transparent and centralized processing of all customs trading documents, which are interchanged between customs departments and the trading community comprising importers, exporters, Custom House Agents (CHA), other government departments and banks. 

The EDI Gateway would enable filling of all import and export documents over the Internet. The EDI/EC gateway system is proposed to be located in the Office of the Directorate of Systems, Central Board of Excise and Customs (CBEC), New Delhi.

The ICENET will connect 23 customs houses of India with the central gateway and will be managed centrally through a robust Enterprise Management System. This network is a stepping-stone to possible data warehousing and centralized monitoring of the customs data for effective MIS and tracking.

Apart from setting up the EDI/EC gateway, the project also involves setting up of Certification Management System as

CBEC plans to become a certificate authority.

Suresh Vaswani, President, Wipro Infotech, said, "This project is testimony to our end-to-end solution capabilities, snapping products, solutions and services. It is a matter of great pride for Wipro Infotech to be the IT service provider to the CBEC in such an ambitious project." This setup is scheduled to go online by January 2002.