Sinha asks industry to refrain from seeking concessions

Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha today asked the corporates to refrain from seeking concessions and suggested that they should rather come up with proposals to increase tax revenues.
"Very often we see proposals coming in where people say give us this concession, give us a free pass... In a situation where we had a high fiscal deficit, tax to GDP is far below... our debt to GDP is such that we have to exercise fiscal discipline," Sinha said at an event organised by Public Affairs Forum of India (PAFI).
He urged the corporates to refrain from seeking such concessions, which benefit a few, and instead come up with proposals which aids the industry as a whole.

"My suggestion to you all is, please bring a proposal which is going to increase tax revenues, not decrease tax revenues. Those which are going to decrease tax revenue, that require fiscal concessions are very very difficult for us to accommodate. We need to increase tax revenues," Sinha said.
He also suggested to bring forward practical solutions to deal with problems.
"If your proposal comes in saying give me a fiscal concession and it is going to cost the government money and really what you are saying is transfer money from people's pocket to my pocket. Those proposals are very very difficult for us to act on," he said.

Sinha said the government is taking actions to ensure that decisions are taken in national interest and hence it adopted a bottom-up approach in solving the banking sector woes.

"It is easy to fix somethings with a sort of decisive intervention, but since we are operating in a national interest, a decisive intervention from the top is not necessarily in national interest," he added.
He said that in the banking sector the government has embarked on a comprehensive set of reforms through the Indradhanush roadmap, which is a bottom-up approach, a process driven way and would fix problems overtime.
Sinha said that the government cannot tackle all issues at one go and there is need to sequence that.

"We are in a policy making cauldron. We cannot tackle everything all at once. We have bandwidth issues in terms of execution capacity at the ground level, we have bandwidth issues about what can go through the legislative process, there are bandwidth issues in terms of decision making at the policymaker level... So we have to sequence," he said.