Initial challenges faced by exports sector to be addressed on war-footing: Ganesh Kumar Gupta, President, FIEO
July 14, 2017: FIEO president Ganesh Kumar Gupta while addressing the exporters during the post GST Meet on Export Compliance organised by FIEO at Mumbai recently said that introduction of GST is a path breaking reform that will only bear fruits in the long run with initial hiccups.
He explained that the liquidity problem of the exporters, constraints in job work, delays in initial returns for exports in the months of July and August, procedural issues in LUT/Bond are being flagged by FIEO and he has strongly highlighted some of them during his meeting with Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently. He lauded the government’s swift response on FIEO’s request and appointing Satya Srinivas, JS Customs as nodal point in CBEC and Ajay Srivastava, Jt. DGFT as nodal point in DGFT to answer to the queries of the exporters.
Meanwhile, Ajay Sahai, DG & CEO, FIEO raised the concern that GST will severely dent the liquidity of the exporter in a big way and the compliance cost of merchant exporter may go up. Export competitiveness of India may tank by about 2 percent and this will be a big blow for the exporters. He appraised that government is looking into the various options to neutralize the effect under the new GST regime.
Addressing the participants Khalid M Khan, Regional Chairman, FIEO (WR), flagged the issue that while transition input tax credits and inherent benefits of GST would lower costs, higher GST rates for products may spoil sport in some cases. Determination of price and being competitive would be critical for all enterprises especially for price sensitive products. Even MSMEs would work on pricing patterns to remain effective.
The meeting was also addressed by P K Mohanty, Consultant, GST, CBEC; Rajiv Jalota, Commissioner, State Tax GST; John Joseph, IRS, Chief Commissioner of Customs, Mumbai Zone – II; Rajeev Tandon, IRS, Chief Commissioner of Customs, Mumbai Zone – I; Sonia Sethi, IAS, Addl. DGFT, Mumbai and Deepak Mata, IRS, Assistant Director, NACIN.
