Captains of industry welcome Budget, make suggestions

: Captains of various sectors of industry on Saturday welcomed the Union budget and provided suggestions to the Finance Minister Nirmala Seetharaman.

President of Tirupur Exporters' Association Raja M Shanmugham termed the budget as a people-oriented one.

Appreciating the focus on agriculture and farmers welfare, wellness and education and skills, Shanmugham, in a statement, said the measures announced in the budget would help overall development of economy.

He said the allocation of Rs 100 lakh crore for investment in infrastructure would lead to cut in logistics cost.

"As of now, poor logistics is one of the hindrance factors for attaining the export competitiveness by our units," he said.

Welcoming the proposal of setting up a National Technical Textile mission at an outlay of Rs 1,480 crore, he said it would boost the manufacturing of technical textiles in the country, he said.

The fund allocation for the Amended Textile Upgradation fund was only Rs 761.90 crore when the pending claims to the industry is to the tune of Rs 8,500 crores, he said and added that this would not attract the industry to go for modernisation.

Shanmugham expressed hope the government would consider and address the issue.

Convenor (economic affairs and taxation panel), Coimbatore Zone CII G Karthikeyan said the budget was presented with a recessionary phase in the background and hoped that there would be some big ticket reforms and tax cuts.

It is a welcome move that all-round allocations made in health care, renewable energy, education, technology- related advancements would not only benefit society at large but also help in pushing aggregate demand.

"We need to wait and see whether these will suffice in ...spurring growth," Karhikeyan said.

A long standing demand of increasing deposit insurance of banks has been met with the limit per deposit increasing from Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakhs, he said.

It is a good move to see that start-up ESOPs (employee stock ownership plan) have been tax-deferred and it remains to be seen whether these measures would push demand, consumption, and private investment and help the economy turn around, he said.

Head (treasury) of Lakshmi Vilas Bank R K Gurumurthy said tinkering with the personal tax and some structural changes in the way DDT (dividend distribution tax) would work are cosmetic benefits that the small and medium investor will like.

The worry is that there was no specific mention of bank recapitalisation, which when read with RBIs Financial Stability Report that NPLs (non-performing loans) could still haunt banks, could raise concern and cripple the ability of banks to lend, he said.

Gross and net borrowings are marginally higher. Market may be able to absorb the incremental borrowing without much impact, he said adding that overall, it was a compact budget.