To encourage more investment in the manufacturing sector and exports, the interim Budget may extend the sunset date for commencing manufacturing from March 31, 2024, till March 31, 2027, for companies availing 15% concessional income tax rate, the apex body of exporters said.
It also highlighted that India’s outward remittance on transport services is increasing with rising exports and the country remitted over $80 billion as transport service charge in 2021. As the country moves towards the goal of $1 trillion, this will touch $200 billion by 2030, FIEO said, adding that the private sector may be engaged to develop the shipping lines.
“This will also reduce arm-twisting by foreign shipping lines, particularly of our MSMEs,” said FIEO President (Officiate), Israr Ahmed.
For promoting Research and Development (R&D) in the country, weighted tax deduction can be increased to 200%, it said.“Unfortunately, India’s spending on R&D (less than 1% of GDP) is well below that in major nations such as China (2.43% of GDP), US (3.46%), Korea (4.93%) and Israel (5.56%),” Ahmed said.He said that aggressive export marketing is required to showcase Indian products and services to the global customers and for that more funds are required under the Market Access Initiative (MAI) scheme, and emphasised on the need for the creation of a corpus for the scheme.
The organisation suggested that the government can consider announcing a scheme on a pilot basis in 50 districts with a corpus of Rs 5,000 crore.
