Hard Times?

Excluded from the Budget benefits and troubled by a recessionary year, the cement industry may now have to struggle against infrastructure shortages.

In the euphoria after P Chidambaram presented his Budget, there was one section that wasn't cheering too loudly: the cement industry.

Cement companies were looking forward to being classified as an infrastructure industry, a label that would have helped earn them generous tax breaks and benefits to the investors. Instead, the finance minister kept them squarely outside this purview.

This disappointment comes on top of a year and a half of falling prices and lower margins. This shows in falling realisations