Agra industry terms Budget a mixed bag

BUDGET BYTES: VIEWS FROM THE NORTH

The Budget has elicited mixed responses from the businessmen in Agra.

The city's leather exporters are happy about the raise in the excise cut-off slab from Rs 1 crore to Rs 1.5 crore for small scale industries, which has resulted in about 10 per cent of the small scale leather units coming out of the tax net.

Apart from the leather industry, the other small scale industry units benefiting from this tax-relief shall be the diesel engine, lock and glass industries.

At least 25 diesel engine units, 55 leather footwear units, 30 glass units and a similar number of lock manufacturing units shall come out of the excise net.

The 50 per cent reduction in excise on footwear soles and other components shall benefit atleast 60 "� 70 export units but by not removing the 16 percent countervailing duty (CVD) on customs duty, the finance minister has failed to impress the footwear exporters.

According to the industry sources, though the customs duty on the import of footwear machinery had been reduced from 12.5 percent to 10 percent, the prices of imported machinery shall not come down much due to CVD imposed on customs duty.

According to Mr. Nazeer Ahmed, Managing Director, Park Exports, raising the excise duty slab could not be called as a major relief measure for the leather industry as the number of leather units benefiting from this relief was too low.

The principal demands of the industry to remove CVD from footwear machinery import and bringing the leather export agents out of the service tax net had not been touched by the budget and the industry is overall disappointed by this year's budget.

The worst affected by this year's budget has been the hotel industry of Agra which has been ignored in the tax holiday offered by the finance minister to the new star-category hotels being constructed in the National Capital Territory (NCT) in anticipation of the forthcoming demand for atleast 20 thousand more rooms in this zone during the 2010 commonwealth games.

According to the industry sources, the India Tourism department had indicated earlier that the Agra hotel industry shall have to increase the number of available rooms by atleast five thousand for the forthcoming commonwealth games and a number of hotel groups had been planning to enter the city with their projects to develop star category hotels in Agra.

Now, with the city being completely ignored by the finance minister in providing a tax relief, the hotel projects that were yet to begin, could easily shift away from Agra into the NCT which was a major blow to the hotel industry that had been dealt by the finance minister in this budget.