The mid-year reshuffle assumes significance at this time when the finance ministry is struggling to meet the revenue targets, both at the direct and indirect front.

A revenue department official said that the transfers have been done at the behest of revenue secretary Javed Choudhry. "The transfers have been done mainly on the ground of non-performance by the respective officers, particularly, when the revenue department, which is anticipating a revenue shortfall of over Rs 16,000 crore is trying to plug revenue leakages", said the official.

"Whenever there is a revenue slippage, the excise and customs officials become the favourite whipping boys", he added. The central excise duty target has been set at Rs 57,690 crore and customs duty at Rs 48,148 crore for the current fiscal.

For 1997-98 fiscal, the excise duty target had been fixed at Rs52,200 crore and customs at Rs 52,550 crore which was revised to Rs 47,700 crore and Rs 41,000 crore.

"Excise collections are up by seven per cent and customs by two per cent till now as against the targeted 20 per cent increase in the collections this year", said the official.

Department sources said the transfers have taken most of the senior revenue officers by surprise as the department had carried out a similar exercise a few months back. This is perhaps the third or fourth time in the past one year that the government has transferred commissioners of customs and central excise all over the country, they added.

Finance minister Yashwant Sinha had recently admitted that the fiscal deficit would overshoot the target of 5.6 per cent in the current fiscal, mainly on account of the shortfall in customs and excise revenue due to the industrial slowdown.

Though the direct tax collections are largely on target, the government anticipates a shortfall of over Rs 16,000 crore in the indirect tax collectionsthis fiscal.

The government is trying to prevent further slippage of revenue in the remaining three months of the current financial year by curbing Modvat misuse, speedy adjudication of pending cases and stepping up anti-evasion activities. The much-publicised kar vivad samadhan scheme, which was supposed to have come to an end on December 31, has also been extended till January-end.

The government had recently set up a special task force headed by the director general (anti-evasion) central excise R K Chakrabarti to detect the growing misuse of Modvat and suggest ways to counter it.