New Delhi, Dec 6 (KNN) The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley as a part of the ongoing pre-budgetary meeting held a session with representatives from different trade and industry organizations including Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and the Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME) at the north block earlier today.

With different sectors of the industry making different representations, following are the key highlights of the points raised during the meeting.

Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (FISME) President Dinesh Chandra Tripathi represented the meeting with the concerns pertaining to the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises.

Tripathi urged the Finance Minister to consider special incentives to the SME sector considering the fact that the sector is labour intensive and generates major chunk of employment for the economy.

Also the FISME President further asked for a clubbing of the different social security elements into a 10 per cent bar.

Industry body CII highlighted the concerns pertaining to the power distribution and called for exploring the possibility to form a national power distribution board to address the concerns and ensure transparent mechanism.

The participating members urged for creating a national level land bank clubbing together the unutilized land chunks lying with different state governments and central government and help it be of use to the industries.

With regard to the Goods and Services Tax (GST), rationalizing the taxation into three broad slabs was put up before the finance minister.

Also the industry asked Finance Minister to consider lowering the corporate tax figure considering the fact that globally there has been a cut in the taxation on corporate sector. 

With regard to the refund delays, the industry representatives raised that the refunds are still pending and urged the finance minister to release the ISGT refunds along with the duty drawback.

Also representations from tourism sector urged the government to consider a zero per cent tax rate or a five per cent tax rate on the sector.

Taxation on outbound tourism should be eliminated and the structure on the travel and tourism intermediaries must be lowered, tourism sector urged.

The sector also called for a corpus to be introduced for the promotion of the tourism sector in the country.

Responding to the demands, the Finance Minister gave the representatives a patient hearing and assured positive steps from the government’s end in exploring the possibilities. (KNN/DA)