By Sharad Kumar Saraf
The Indian economy is set to come to be the quickest expanding economy in 2021. The principal plank of development is Atmanirbhar Bharat (self-reliance across sectors), which calls for competitive manufacturing, services and agriculture. All these will need enormous infra spending to make planet-class facilities. The Union Budget proactively moves in this path. The creation of the Development Finance Institution with a corpus of Rs 20,000 crore for infra financing is the will need of the hour, and then monetising it, like devoted freight corridors, airports, and so forth, so that flow of capital is ensured to invest in new physical and social infrastructure.
The setting up of seven mega investment textile parks in addition to the PLI scheme for the textile sector will attract massive investments in the textile sector, which is facing competitors from China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Turkey, Indonesia, Taiwan, and so forth. Smaller nations like Bangladesh and Vietnam have moved ahead of us with massive FDI flowing into the sector. Textile parks and units eligible for PLI will attract each overseas and domestic investment. The government is searching into the problem of inverted duty structure in the GST, which may possibly also address some of the challenges faced by the textile sector.
The assistance to shipping will pave the way for building massive shipping lines in India to compete with foreign shipping lines. India annually remits more than $65 billion in transport services, and with exports targeted to touch $1 trillion, the very same will swell in the next handful of years. An Indian shipping line will not only enable retain such remittances, but will also have a prepared-created marketplace. The privatisation of the management of important ports will bring the vital efficiency to provide greater services at competitive charges, because our important ports have massive capacity but are losing marketplace share to private ports.
India is creating on its agri exports by way of the Agriculture Export Policy and transport and advertising and marketing help. However, the lack of agri infrastructure is a really serious handicap. The levy of agri infra cess of Rs 2.5 per litre on petrol and Rs 4 per litre on diesel will provide vital corpus for creating planet-class infrastructure to hyperlink farm to fork.
Metal and commodity rates are moving northward and reduction in customs duty on a lot of inputs such as steel scrap, semi/flat of alloy and non-alloy steel, copper scrap, nylon fibre, nylon chips and caprolactam and so forth would enable soften increasing rates. But the Budget really should have focused on R&D by way of tax deduction and exemption as India’s R&D spending is incredibly low, even as R&D and innovation are vital for sustained exports. We have been searching for higher assistance to the Department of Commerce at a time when international trade has shown indicators of recovery so that pending claims of exporters are released to ease liquidity and higher push is offered to advertising and marketing and branding.
(Writer is the President of FIEO)