Scrap import duty on steel, reduce red-tapism: Electromech

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Tushar Mehendale , Managing Director, ElectroMech feels that the Union Budget can be a great way for the Central Government to address the issues of local municipal corporations. He said, "In states like Maharashtra, imposing anachronistic levies like octroi, entry tax, etc which make it very difficult to plan logistics and add unnecessary costs and hassles. While these levies do form a major source of income for the corporations, some alternate arrangements have to be implemented in this budget like the much discussed cess on VAT."

Mehendale further added, "In order to make Indian exports more competitive, it is also important to do away with the import duty on steel as raw material altogether. Currently there seems to be some sort of collusion between major steel suppliers and market operators which ensures that steel prices are always unrealistically high."

According to Mehendale, the levies on inter-state sale of goods should be removed or alternatively, red-tape requirement of issuing the "C" forms, should be done away with. "The "C" Form issue creates a lot of bureaucratic hassles to the industries in India", he said.

Mehendale wants India to emulate its Western peers. He said, "Whenever I compare notes with my partners in Europe / Australia, I am amazed at the low strength of people that they have in their accounting department in spite of having much larger businesses. He shares his analysis. "On analysis, we found out that almost 70% time of people in the accounts department is spent unproductively on ensuring all sorts of compliances like Income Tax, TDS, Service Tax, Excise Duty, Customs, VAT, Octroi, Central Sales Tax, Professional Tax, etc. It's about time the government really rationalized all these different taxes and made life easy for people engaged in seriously trying to compete in the global industry."