India Inc asks for sops, lower rates after IIP growth falls

With industrial output growth slowing down in December, India Inc today pitched for incentives in the Budget to revive investments while reiterating its call for lower interest rates.
"We are hopeful that the forthcoming budget would factor in the slow growth in manufacturing for the last many months and the need to provide major incentives to revive investments in the sector," Ficci Secretary General A Didar Singh said.
"The demand in the economy also remains subdued as reflected in the muted growth of consumer goods sector. Further lowering of interest rates by RBI is needed to boost consumer and investment sentiments," Singh said.

Industrial production growth rate slowed to 1.7 per cent in December last year on a sequential basis mainly due to a contraction in the mining and quarrying sector.
Manufacturing output, which constitutes over 75 per cent to the index, grew by 2.1 per cent in December compared to a dip of 1.1 per cent in the same month a year ago.
"Though the manufacturing sector performance has improved in December, the government still needs to push more reforms so as to revive its growth on a sustainable basis," Assocham President Rana Kapoor said.

"The new found euphoria needs to be backed by concrete policy action in order to see sustainable growth. In line with this, it is felt that the Union Budget for 2015-16 must aim primarily at growth," he added.

CII Director General Chandrajit Banerjee said the Union Budget presents a great opportunity to provide further fillip to investments.
"Some measures that could be considered could include incentivizing the Make in India initiative by reworking minimum alternate tax, restoring incentives for SEZs and providing a stable, transparent and predictable tax and regulatory environment for business," he said.
"The mood in the industry is positive and investments have come back to the Agenda of Corporate Board meetings. The pro-active measures taken by the government in the last eight months have contributed to this. The RBI has also started the easing cycle and CII expects that the RBI would reduce interest rates by another 100 bps in the course of the year," Banerjee said.

The November IIP has been revised upwards to 3.9 per cent from 3.8 per cent.
For the April-December period of 2014-15, IIP is 2.1 per cent as against 0.1 per cent in same period of the last fiscal.