Jaitley urges greater thrust to MSME sector, infra creation

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday claimed that India's MSME sector needs more strength, in order to achieve crucial development for the economy.

Addressing the 90th Annual General Meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) here, Jaitley also stated that infrastructure creation needs to be given more focus, be it rural or urban.

"Railway is one area where we need to hurry up with the level of infrastructure expenditure. Our expenditure on railway stations, quality of trains, superfast trains, bullet trains and so on need to be strengthened. We want to strengthen the MSME sector as well, along with rural infrastructure, as here lies the core of India's future story," he said.

Jaitley opined that while in 1991, economic reforms had been taken out of compulsion, structural change in 2017 has been done out of conviction, while speaking over the structural reforms that have been implemented in the recent past, including introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

"Even when the world was still in the slowdown phase and yet to take a curve for the better, India realised the importance of structural changes. I must confess that I had thought that after unified GST is implemented it will take a reasonable amount of time when collections move up that you'll start rationalising tariffs. Even I had not anticipated that we would be able to start rationalising within three to four months. We need to keep this agenda going for greater formalisation of the economy," said Jaitley.

He also stated that apart from strengthening the MSME sector, the Centre aims to strengthen public sector banks in a bid to improve the ability of banks to support growth and improve their lending capacity, particularly for the MSME segment.