Meghalaya cabinet lowers IMFL export fee to generate revenue

Meghalaya cabinet today accepted several proposals, including lowering export fee on IMFL, submitted by the State Excise department to generate additional revenue.
Announcing this after a cabinet meeting, Chief Minister Mukul Sangma said at present there is no IMFL being exported from the state as the rate is high. "So the department has proposed to bring it down to Rs 5 per case instead of Rs 100."
The CM said, the government had earlier taken the same measure for export fee on beer and now the department has been able to generate a total revenue of Rs 7.6 lakh through export in the current year till date.

For extra neutral alcohol, the CM said, "We have decided to impose both import and export fees. The import fee will be Rs 10 per bulb liter and export fee is Rs 5 paise per bulb liter."
The state government also approved the proposal to allow the sale of fresh beer in hotel and licensed bars.
Sangma said the government has directed all retail outlets to print the maximum retail price (MRP) in the bottles of IMFL and beer so that consumers will be able to know the price and there will be no room for manipulation.

The cabinet also decided to increase the rate of the value added tax (VAT) on goods falling under Schedule 4 by one per cent to 14.5 per cent.

The CM said it will enable the government mop up additional revenue of approximately Rs 25 crore.
"Relating to work contracts, all developmental programmes implemented by the government, the tax is deducted at the source and since investment have gone up and further investment are in pipeline, we expect that this particular measure will help us mop up more than the projected Rs 25 crore," he said.