Promising a business friendly environment to woo foreign investments, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday made it clear that retrospective tax will not be imposed and that taxation policy has to be “non-adversarial”.
“Our Taxation process has to be simpler to increase tax buoyancy. Our taxation policy has to be non-adversarial. The government does not intend to tax people retrospectively,” Mr. Jaitley said.
He said that the corporate tax structure has to be globally competitive and that is why the government has proposed to reduce it from 30 to 25 per cent in this year’s Budget.
“Decision-making has to be much quicker. The process of political consensus has to be statesman-like and mature,” he said addressing D P Kohli Memorial Lecture here.
The Finance Minister said that agriculture as well as infrastructure sectors face serious challenges due to lack of investment.
“Highways programme has slowed down and investment has not come in railways. We have to invest Rs 70,000 crore in infrastructure sector and that is why we have to little delay the fiscal road map,” Mr. Jaitley said.
Meanwhile, he said there is a need to revisit certain provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
“We need to revisit provisions of Prevention of Corruption,” he said, while noting that the concerned departments and civil servants were reluctant to take decisions.
Phrases like “corrupt means”, “public interest” and “pecuniary advantages” have to be redefined in the present context to differentiate between the act of corruption and honest error, Mr. Jaitley said.
