 "Tamil Nadu in talks with centre on ease of doing business index, says industry secretary")
The Government of Tamil Nadu is in talks with the central government on rationalisation of the ease of doing business index, in the wake of recent ranking by the centre in which the State was ranked as 18th. Around Rs 87,000 crore investment out of the Rs 2.42 lakh crore committed during the Global Investors' Meet in 2015, is being implemented in the State, said a senior administrative officer from the State government.
Vikram Kapoor, Principal Secretary of Industries, Government of Tamil Nadu, said that the Centre need to relook at the 340 items based on which the ranking has been prepared, since there is a lot of duplication and huge points disproportionately assigned to certain aspects like inspections, while the weightage should have been given to other aspects such as feedback from the industry. He was speaking on the sidelines of the Conference on Tamil Nadu Manufacturing, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry.
"The Government of India have been in discussion with the states on how to further refine the index and we will give our input to the central government with other states and hopefully next time around you will see the result," he said.
"There was also an issue of showing evidence in most of the cases the state was compliant, but we didnt have time to produce those evidence or it was not accepted. Certain states, may be smarter enough to get it through," he said.
"We are ensuring that next time around, we do provide all the evidence. We are confident that in terms of ease of doing business, we are no less than any other leading state. There is always areas to improve. It takes certain time to get certain clearances from some departments, but that is because Tamil Nadu is a law abiding, rule bound State," he added.
He said that the implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) will change the way states attract investors. While states are currently looking at what kind of tax refunds they can offer to attract the industries with some incentives, the implementation of GST will affect such incentives.
From next year it has to be looked at what would be the viability of giving such kind of sops on sales tax and others. Instead of these fiscal incentives, things like ease of doing business, the availability of land, labour, connectivity, infrastructure and would be more important as a differentiator rather than which states give more tax incentives, he said. All States need to sit together and see what will be the future.
The state continues to attract investments from the sectors such as automobiles. For example, Ford is investing around Rs 3,700 crore in their production facility and another Rs 1,300 crore in the research and development centre. Most of the major manufacturers has plans to expand production capacity in Tamil Nadu, he added.
The state government, along with the Centre, is in discussion to revive the mobile handset manufacturing plant of Nokia India and the centre is examining various aspects, since it is more to do with the central government. The state government is working towards an early resolution, he added.
