Departments to give opinion on Hota panel report in three months

The Orissa government will take a call on implementing the recommendations of the Hota committee on revenue enhancement after the concerned departments submit their comments.

"We had discussions on the recommendations given by the expert committee on revenue enhancement. A decision will be taken after the concerned departments submit their comments on the committee's recommendations. The departments will be submitting their comments within three months,” said state Chief Secretary B K Patnaik after the first review meeting held after the expert committee submitted its report.

The state finance minister Prafulla Chandra Ghadai had recently said in the Assembly that the state government is expected to garner additional revenue of about Rs 2000 crore per annum if the recommendations of the expert committee on revenue enhancement headed by Sanjib Chandra Hota are accepted in toto.

The GSDP of the state is projected at Rs 214,309 crore by the end of 2011-12 and it is set to grow by one per cent if the panel's recommendations are approved.

The copy of the report has been sent by the finance secretary to all departmental secretaries. The concerned departments have been asked to examine the recommendations and prepare Action Plan for implementation of these recommendations.

To accept the recommendations of the expert committee, the state government needs to go for administrative restructuring and also make some legal changes if needed. The state government expected to implement the committee's recommendations in two years.

Justifying the need to form the committee, the minister had said, "The state government will lose Rs 1500-2000 crore after the refinery project of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL) at Paradeep becomes operational. The state also needs to enhance its tax-GSDP ratio to seven per cent which currently stands at six per cent. All this requires additional revenue generation and hence the committee was constituted to diversify the state's revenue base."

The Hota committee had projected that the cumulative impact on collection of Value Added Tax (VAT) from petroleum products after commissioning of the IOCL refinery at Paradeep during 2013-24 may be of the order of Rs 50,195.89 crore.