‘Time to take important initiatives leading to continued growth’

-says Rajat Jain, MD, Xerox India, while conveying his expectations from the 2013 Union Budget

The Indian printing (and allied) industry is the fastest growing in the world. Forward looking policies that drive greater efficiency via improved raw material procurement and technology deployments are critical to ensuring sustained growth – and wider impact across both large and small business segments in our growing economy. The time for action is now – and the budget is an indicator of government sentiment and investments in enabling what we believe should be inclusive growth – both social as well as economic – in this vast nation, said Rajat Jain, MD, Xerox India, while sharing his expectations from the 2013 Union Budget.

“We are looking forward to this budget for several reasons – but mostly because the global economic environment is calling for important initiatives in India that will lead us to continued growth: To begin with, the government must continue the good work begun last year – where we moved to a negative list taxation regime for service tax purposes. This has led to overlap of VAT and service tax in certain situations. The FM can look at alleviating this hardship and higher costs for customers as this is against the spirit of GST. Industry has been waiting for the GST regime – and perhaps it is time for some provisions which advance the structure and spirit of GST, to be brought into this budget in the interim,” said Rajat.

“Furthermore, the precarious global fiscal situation around the globe and adverse forex movement for Indian importers, make it imperative that Government supports the industry with regulatory, tax and trade incentives. We can ill afford to lose the momentum gained in earlier years by not addressing the bottlenecks in our trade ecosystem, in turn allowing other fast emerging economies to capitalize on global opportunities,” he mentioned.

“Lastly – a conducive environment is imperative today, where ecosystem players come together to promote citizen benefits in sectors such as healthcare, education, IT and telecom, power and infrastructure. Budgetary allocations and policy reforms promoting local innovation, greater collaboration between industry players and the government and creating an environment for new investments in key development sectors is the need of the hour,” added Rajat.