November 29: Excise duty stickers used for cigarettes and liquor are being printed extensively within the country as the government is running out of stock.

A total of 5 million stickers are being printed on a daily basis, according to the state-owned printing press Janak Education Materials Limited (JEMC) which has been awarded the contract to print the stickers.

JEMC has been assigned to print 700 million pieces of excise duty stickers in the current year.

Officials at JEMC say that they have increased the rate of printing stickers as per the demand of the Inland Revenue Department.

“We started printing immediately after Tihar. We have managed everything for printing the excise duty stickers,” said Mahesh Prasad Timilsina, director general of JEMC.

The finance ministry had decided to hand over the responsibility of printing the excise duty stickers to JEMC for the time being to meet the requirement for the current fiscal year.

The IRD was under pressure to print the stickers within the country because the process of issuing global tender would be time consuming and would have resulted in shortage of stickers.

Meanwhile, the IRD has initiated the process to call international tender for printing an additional 9 billion excise duty stickers abroad.

Last year, when the government had initiated the process of calling tender for international bids, Miraj Printing Solution had filed a writ petition at the Supreme Court stating that the local companies had been deprived of participating in the bidding process.

Following the writ petition filed by Mohan Raj Ghimire, the apex court had ordered the government to open tender bids for domestic companies by considering their capacity to print.

Director General of IRD argues that all domestic companies that meet the criteria can also apply for the international bidding process.