April 19: The Tatopani Customs Office has collected revenue exceeding the target set for the first nine months of the current fiscal year.    

The office collected Rs 8.56 billion in revenue against the target of Rs 5.59 billion, Customs Chief Dayananda KC told RSS.    

According to KC, trade from the Tatopani Customs Point has increased after the resumption of the Nepal-China border.    

The Chinese government agreed to resume the two-way trade via Tatopani-Khasa route during a bilateral meeting of Nepal-China Coordination Mechanism on Border Trade and Cooperation held in Lhasa in March last year.

As per the agreement, the Tatopani transit point was opened for full-fledged operation on May 1 last year, raising high hopes of increased trade. The transit point was opened more than three years after it was initially closed to control the COVID-19 outbreak in March 2020.    Nepal’s export through the Tatopani-Khasa border had been almost nil since the 2015 earthquake.

Prior to the earthquake, the trade volume through this transit point used to be more than Rs 150 billion annually.

The revenue collected in the first nine months of this year is more than the revenue collected during the entire last fiscal year.

The government had set a target of collecting Rs 4.62 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year from this customs point, but it collected only Rs 2.20 billion in the corresponding period of that year.