Portall Infosystems Pvt Ltd has been granted a contract to build and run Marine – a national logistics portal, for the government.
A unit of logistics conglomerate JM Baxi Group, Portall will build and operate NLP-Marine, a pan-India single window platform that seeks to help exporters, importers and service providers to seamlessly exchange documents. This platform will help facilitate business in a transparent and swift way.
Last September, the government had invited bids for the design, development, integration, implementation, operation and maintenance of the National Logistics Portal – Marine Version 1.0.
“The letter of intent has been issued to the portal and a formal contract will be signed soon,” a government official said. “This is a big initiative of the government; A big step for the logistics and business community of India,” he said.
Portal Infosystems bid for the contract in partnership with Germany’s DBH Consulting GmbH and Inspiresys Solutions Ltd., which is a unit of CAC Holdings Corporation of Japan.
The project aims to bootstrap the existing Port Community System (PCS 1x) run by the portal for the government and meet the needs of the industry to make it a national single window platform for all maritime trade stakeholders.
Enabling ease of doing business
NLP-Marine is poised to facilitate ease of doing business and in addition to it, make India one of the most cost-effective and competitive countries in international trade, while bringing about transparency in accessing information in the supply chain for all stakeholders.
The main objective of NLP is to function as a central system for electronic sharing and exchange with interoperability in sea, air, rail, inland waterways and coastal movement of goods.
Boost for Customs
National Single Window Logistics Platform is designed in a way that it can cater to the core activities of Importer, Exporter and Customs Broker such as Domestic Tracking of Shipment with information at each stage, Self Customs Clearance, Online Transactions with Custodian, Remote Electronic Data Will be done. Interchange (EDI) System Package – Bill of Entry and Shipping Bill checklist plus Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for file generation and document management system to securely store all important documents on cloud storage.
It will facilitate real-time information on activities which are normally accessible to the importer, exporter, customs broker, including vessel related information, terminal gate and container freight station (CFS) gate transactions.
Furthermore, it will also enable digital transactions for all payments that are required for the clearance process of imports and exports such as CFS charges, shipping line charges, transportation charges, etc.
The single window platform will be the first of its kind to provide B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Government) services.