Manish Mohan Govil Gets Additional Charge of CRCL Director Post at CBIC

The Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs has entrusted the additional charge of the post of Director, Revenue Laboratories, at the Central Revenue Control Laboratories to Manish Mohan Govil, Principal Commissioner, Directorate of Logistics, until further orders. He is an IRS officer of the Customs and Indirect Taxes cadre.

The Central Revenue Control Laboratories function as the CBIC's scientific testing arm, providing chemical and technical analysis that underpins customs classification, valuation disputes, and enforcement action against mis-declared or prohibited goods moving through Indian ports and land borders. The Director, Revenue Laboratories post oversees this testing infrastructure across the CRCL's network of laboratories, which handle everything from narcotics identification to the classification testing that determines applicable customs duty on chemical and industrial imports.

Govil's substantive posting as Principal Commissioner in the Directorate of Logistics places him within one of CBIC's operational wings responsible for coordinating customs infrastructure and logistics support across field formations, a role distinct from the CRCL's scientific testing mandate that he now additionally oversees, requiring him to split administrative attention between logistics coordination and technical laboratory oversight until a dedicated appointee is named. The Directorate of Logistics itself handles matters such as customs infrastructure at ports and land border checkpoints, meaning Govil's substantive charge already carries a heavy coordination load before accounting for the additional CRCL responsibility.

Additional-charge arrangements of this kind are a routine administrative tool within the CBIC when a specialised post falls vacant and a suitable full-time appointee has not yet been identified, allowing an officer of appropriate seniority to keep the post functional in the interim without disrupting ongoing testing and certification work that field formations depend on for enforcement action.

His dual charge reflects the broader pattern of CBIC managing gaps in its scientific and technical wings by drawing on Principal Commissioner-rank officers from adjacent directorates rather than leaving specialised posts vacant for extended periods, a practice that has drawn occasional criticism for stretching senior officers thin across unrelated technical and administrative functions. The CBIC's scientific wing has historically had a smaller pool of officers with the specific technical background needed to head laboratory operations, which is part of why additional-charge arrangements recur more often at the CRCL than at some of the Board's other specialised directorates.

The CRCL's testing output feeds directly into ongoing customs enforcement and revenue assessment cases, meaning the Director's office cannot remain without oversight for long, which is the operational rationale typically cited for such interim arrangements, particularly where classification disputes before appellate tribunals depend on laboratory certification within statutory timelines. Delays in laboratory reports have, in the past, held up adjudication in classification and valuation disputes before the Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal, which is one reason the CBIC treats continuity of the Director's office as an operational priority rather than a purely administrative formality.

The additional charge remains in force until further orders from the CBIC, with no specified end date attached to the arrangement. The Board is expected to identify a full-time appointee for the post in due course, following the same seniority and empanelment considerations that apply to other technical and scientific postings within the department.