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The Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, with all his good intentions, has failed to tackle some of the basic issues such as MAT impeding the growth of the industry and he should have done much more to spur economic growth, especially as his party has got a clear mandate and there are no coalition compulsions, according to O. Naresh Kumar, the CEO of Symbiosys Technologies, a local IT company.
He was speaking at a seminar on the Union Budget organised by the Visakhapatnam zone of the Confederation of Indian Industry here on Monday. He said there was nothing much in the Budget for the IT sector and on the issue of retrospective taxation too the Budget was disappointing. "Take for instance the IT sector. India is the second largest internet user in the world and we are heavily dependent on imported software. The Finance Minister should have set up a fund for promoting indigenous software. Our electronic imports are rising all the time and yet there is no move to promote the local industry. In other sectors too he was merely content with piece-meal changes and there are no bold moves to give a clear-cut direction to the economy," he said.
He also remarked that the Finance Minister had announced as many as 30 projects with a paltry allocation of Rs 100 crore and "the Finance Minister took as much as one hour to read out the details of the schemes. One can only call it mere tokenism."
The other representatives from the industry were kinder to the Finance Minister and they said he had done his best under the circumstances and sought to give a direction to the economy. S.S Lamba, the Managing Director of Eisai Pharma, said Jaitley had mentioned in his speech that the SEZs in the country were contributing of one-third of the exports and steps would be taken to revive them. He said only one-third of the SEZs in the country were operational and therefore the Government should offer more financial incentives to revive them. The issue of MAT should also be addressed.
Neeraj Sarada, the director of Sarada Metals and Alloys Ltd, complimented the Finance Minister for extending tax holiday to power plants up to 2017.
Deepa B Dasgupta, the Chief Commissioner of Central Excise, Customs and Service Tax, D.P Sharma, the Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, and others spoke. G.V.L Satya Kumar, the deputy chairman of the Visakhapatnam port trust and also chairman of the Vizag CII, presided over the seminar.
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