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The Federation of Indian Micro and Small & Medium Enterprises (Fisme) has said it is disappointed with the Union budget as the MSME sector has been relegated to the periphery of Budget pronouncements.
“While hailing the budget as growth-oriented and reformist, MSMEs can’t hide their disappointment from Arun Jaitely’s first full budget, as the sector feels that its concerns have been largely left unaddressed”, it said.
Fisme president D. Gandhikumar said, “Whether it is providing investment allowance or income tax benefit for employing more people or addressing the pains of accepting deposits from friends and relatives, which the new Companies Act has termed as illegal, MSMEs’ concerns have once again failed to attract the attention of the finance minister.”
Thanking the finance minister for considering the demand for providing an option to employees to choose alternative mechanisms to ESI and PF, he assailed the move to hike import duty on steel by 5%, which would render a large number of user MSMEs uncompetitive.
“Iron & steel, copper, aluminum and plastic raw materials are the building blocks of industry. Hiking duties on these raw materials while keeping level of duties constant of finished products leads to instances of inverted tariff and hurts user industries, especially MSMEs”, he said.
Fisme said it has highlighted several pain points of which the sector expected the FM to take cognizance of, but those have been ignored, including the plea to reduce the threshold of investment allowance to zero from Rs25 crore to help MSMEs also take advantage of the provision.
SOURCE: Financial Express