Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday outlined the road map for the second year of the NDA government, which includes making taxation more reasonable and improving the ease of doing business in India.
Maintaining the speed of reforms and eliminating discretions would be the thrust areas of the government going forward as it completes one year in office, he told PTI in an interview.
Answering a question about voices from India Inc. complaining that the government was not walking the talk, Mr. Jaitley said there was no such “overwhelming perception”.
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Some of the reports complaining about the economy not having taken off were “inspired news items referring to a dozen people without naming a single”, he said.
“There is no such overwhelming perception. The perception is essentially amongst a section of the critics. Because that section of the critics will say, this (decision) is a favour to corporates and the next day he will say corporates are unhappy. The two things cannot co-exist,” Mr. Jaitley said.
As for taxation, the Minister said, the effort would be to make it “more reasonable”.
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While on the indirect tax side, the government proposes to roll out the GST by April 1, 2016, on the direct taxes side the Minister said that the rates for corporate tax would be brought down to 25 per cent from 30 per cent over a period of four years.
The government also intends to eliminate exemptions while reducing the rate of corporate tax, though these would be retained for individual taxpayers.
“I would keep exemptions but keep that for individual tax payers and in the last two years I have strengthened the kind of exemptions,” he said.
Speaking about the challenges before the government, he said: “One there is a huge road map how to ease your doing business here...I would say (that) is work in progress.”
Besides pushing the pending legislations like GST and the land acquisition law, Jaitley said, the effort would be to replace the practice of giving permissions through a regulatory mechanism.
That would help in boosting investment and improve execution of projects, he added.
“We had fallen off the global radar and policy decisions were influenced by collateral thinking and if I may use the phrase, which some persons in Congress party use, they abandoned liberalisation and went in for cronyism. So whether it was spectrum, coal this is all examples of cronyism,” he said targeting the previous UPA government.
The NDA government, he said, brought about complete clarity about the road map and took decisions, both executive and legislative.
“A series of decisions we have taken are aimed at one direction. There is no contrarian direction, no blurriness, there is no confusion there is complete cohesion.
“There are no forces outside the government, which can influence the governmental thinking... The responsibility begins and ends with the government,” he said.
The Modi government, he said, has ended the first year in office by eliminating discretions in as many areas as possible.
”...that’s the difference between liberalisation without discretion left in the government and crony capitalism. As a result we have crossed one year without anybody even attempting to make serious or a non-serious allegation of corruption. So it is a fair government (following) a clean process,” Mr. Jaitley said.