An import consignment of foreign-origin areca nuts, intercepted by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and Customs at ICD Durgapur, has produced a Calcutta High Court ruling that separates two questions courts have tended to run together: who decides whether imported food is fit to eat, and who decides what it should be classified and taxed as. The importer, Credence International, had declared the consignment as roasted areca nuts falling under tariff heading 20081991. The DRI suspected the goods were in truth dried areca nuts, misdeclared to dodge a higher duty rate and to get around the minimum import price conditions that apply to dried nuts but not to the roasted variety.
To test that suspicion, Customs drew its own samples and sent them to the National Food Laboratory in Kolkata and a second government-approved laboratory. Both came back finding the goods unsafe, citing mould and insect infestation. For the DRI, the test reports were as useful for proving misdeclaration as they were for flagging a food-safety problem. The importer's objection was not to the findings themselves but to the authority of Customs to have drawn the samples at all, arguing that only officers authorised under the Food Safety and Standards Act could sample a food item, imported or otherwise.
A Single Judge had accepted a version of that argument, holding that FSSAI-authorised officers alone were competent to sample imported food articles, and treating Customs as confined to the narrower purposes of classification, valuation and duty liability. On that view, test reports generated through a DRI-led sampling exercise, even one targeting tariff fraud, sat on shaky ground wherever the goods in question happened to be edible.
The Division Bench of Justices Rajarshi Bharadwaj and Sudip Deb did not accept that the Food Safety and Standards Act displaces Customs' own sampling powers merely because the goods are food. Section 144 of the Customs Act, 1962 lets Customs authorities draw samples for examination, and the Bench read that power as intact for imported food articles just as it is for any other imported goods, whenever the purpose is tariff classification, valuation or the investigation of fiscal fraud. The Food Safety and Standards Act and the Customs Act, the Bench held, operate in distinct and concurrent legislative fields, and neither crowds out the other merely because both can, in a given shipment, come into play at once.
That holding came with a deliberate limit, keeping the two regimes apart rather than collapsing one into the other. Its ruling does not make Customs the arbiter of whether a food consignment is safe to sell or safe to eat, a role the Food Safety and Standards Act reserves to FSSAI's own machinery. What the Bench held is that Customs does not need an FSSAI clearance, or FSSAI's own sampling, before it can investigate suspected fiscal fraud in a food shipment, draw samples for that purpose, and act on what those samples show about classification and valuation. The Single Judge's order was set aside to the extent it had denied Customs that authority.
The practical effect for an importer caught between the two regimes is that a food-safety clearance from FSSAI, even a favourable one, will not by itself immunise a consignment from a parallel customs inquiry into misdeclaration or duty evasion. Equally, a customs finding on classification does not by itself settle whether the goods are fit for human consumption, a question that remains FSSAI's to answer. Importers of commodities that straddle both regimes, areca nuts prominent among them given the gap in duty and import-price treatment between the dried and roasted categories, now face scrutiny on both fronts running in parallel rather than one deferring to the other.
That leaves the underlying classification dispute over the Credence International consignment to proceed on its own footing, with the Customs-ordered test reports back in play as material the authorities can rely on. Whether the goods are held, on fresh adjudication, to be dried or roasted areca nuts, and what duty and import-price consequences follow, is for the adjudicating authority to work out, now unencumbered by the argument that Customs had no business drawing the samples in the first place.