Directorate of Revenue Intelligence(DRI)
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) in Mumbai has
unearthed a ‘banking-hawala’ scam, in which reputed public sector banks
illegally remitted Rs. 2,240 crore overseas based on forged documentation and
declarations of traded goods by exporters and importers.
DRI:
The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence was constituted on 4th
December 1957, for dealing exclusively with the work relating to the collection
and study of information on smuggling activities and the deployment of all
anti-smuggling resources at the all India level, besides arranging training for
the intelligence and Investigation officers of the Custom Houses and Central
Excise Collectorates deployed on similar work.- DRI is the major intelligence agency which eradicates smuggling of drugs, gold, diamonds, electronics, foreign currency, counterfeit Indian currency, etc.
- The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence functions under the Central Board of Excise and Customs in the Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue.
- The Directorate is run by officers from Central Excise and Customs. Though its early days were committed to combating smuggling in of gold, it has now tuned itself to the changing nature of crimes in the field of narcotics and economic crimes.
The essential features of the organization
are:
- It is designed to collect and collate information and to strike swiftly;
- It is officer-intensive and the ministerial staff has been kept at a minimum;
- Although small, it is a high-powered organization so that it can issue instructions to Collectors and can command the confidence and respect of the other State and Central organizations with which it has necessarily to deal in order to become effective;
- It consists of selected officers, that is, those who by temperament and experience, are equipped to do this specialized kind of work;
- It will have no routine job of its own in the sense that it is required to collect a certain amount of revenue. It will have complete liberty to act on ‘hunches’ and only the ends will justify the means it adopts.
