The award has been instituted to promote the government’s ‘ease of doing business’ initiative. As part of the ‘ease of doing business’ initiative, the government is promoting cross-border trade and business by minimising transactions cost and dwell time at the ports.

This was aggressively promoted at the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), Mumbai, which handles almost 55% to 60% of country’s containerised cargo. The Direct Port Delivery is an initiative of the Indian Customs, JNPT, and Central Board of Excise & Custom (CBEC) and other government organisations to benchmark itself against the most efficient ports in the world.

The DPD facility has been extended to top importers whose goods are in FCL (full container load) category and facilitated by RMS (risk management system) for ‘no assessment and no examination’. Due to DPD clearance of containers, which used to take a week, now takes up to 48 hours and an importer saves anywhere between Rs 10,000 to Rs 60,000 per TEU apart from reducing the delivery time of goods.

The implementation of DPD has resulted in the reduction of inventory cost apart from port road getting decongested as frequent ‘to and fro’ movements to CFS are avoided.

Poddar Global is one of the leading newsprint and paper importers and distributors in India for last 30 years, having its own supply chain and paper conversion facility on more than 300,000 sq/ft in all major Indian port towns, including Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Cochin, and New Delhi. Every year, Poddar Global, along with its wholly owned subsidiary company, Sandy Limited, Hong Kong, supply more than 250,000 mt of standard newsprint and other publication paper to more than 350 Indian newspapers and magazines.