Thursday, February 17 2005 16:52 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: The Government today (Feb17, 2005) approved Rs 167.05 crore for upgrading the IT infrastructure of Customs, Excise and Service Tax departments to boost trade.

The Cabinet Committee of Economic Affairs (CCEA), chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, approved the creation of a consolidated computing infrastructure for the indirect tax departments, an official release said.

The upgradation drive involves setting up central servers and storage area networks along with disaster recovery infrastructure having capacity to handle all transactions relating to customs, excise and data warehouse.

A network would also be set up to connect 70 customs locations from the present 23, with the central network 'ICEGATE' for allowing users to log into the central servers.

The project also envisages setting up of a network that would connect all central excise commissionerates to the central servers.

The IT upgradation would lead to better service to trade, information to Central Board of Excise and Customs, more manageable and secure systems and make it financially more viable than distributed systems.