Bhubaneswar: The Cuttack regional authority (RA) office of Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) , an organisatioin under ministry of commerce, has merged with its zonal office at Kolkata.

From September 16 onward, the exporters of Odisha have to file their applications with Kolkata office.

The Cuttack RA office has been asked to transfer local servers and files/records, equipment be transferred to Kolkata office by end of next month.

The DGFT vide its O & M Instruction No 07/2019 dated 05.09.2019, in fact, has completely overhauled its organisational structure. It has reduced its regional authority (RA) offices into 13 from 25 by way of mergers.

Along with Cuttack, the Patna RA has been merged with the Kolkata zonal office as the notification says, ” All the new applications by the exporters of old RA will be filed in the merged RA with effect from 16.9.2019.”

Dheradun and Moradabad RA offices have merged with Delhi and Belagavi with Bangalore. Similarly, Trivendrum has subsumed with Cochin, Madurai with Chennai, Chandigarh with Ludhiana, Shillong with Gawahati, Vijayawada with Visakhapatnam, Bhopal with Indore and Raipur with Nagpur,

Besides, the DC APIIC SEZ,Visakhapatnam will act as head of RA Visakhapatnam, DC Indore SEZ as head of RA Indore, DC Mihan SEZ as head of RA Nagpur, Surat SEZ as head of RA Surat, DC Jamnagar SEZ as RA Rajkot, and Dahez SEZ as head of RA Ahmedabad.

Following series of IT initiatives leading to issue of paperless MEIS, automatic issue of IEC, issue of paperless Advance Authoritsation and EPCG Authorisation, the work has been reduced in smaller RA offices.

“With a view to better utilisation of human man resources and better disposal of work in bigger offices, the DGFT has restructured the organisation”, says the notification.