Government Highlights Steps Taken To Boost Economy

The government today highlighted the various measures that were taken to boost the economy in a press briefing that was also addressed by the Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman.

Government Highlights Steps Taken To Boost Economy

Over the last few months, the Finance Ministry has taken a slew of steps to revive the ailing economy be it slashing corporate taxes, merging banks, setting up a special real-estate fund and announcement of the biggest privatization drive.

The Chief Economic Adviser (CEA), Krishnamurthy Subramanian said that the government is focused on clearing dues, supporting the small and medium enterprises by bill discounting, enabling credit retail and so on. He said that the above-mentioned measures along with corporate tax rate cuts and tax refunds will help to boost the economy.

Measure to Support Consumption

The government has sanctioned support of Rs 4.47 lakh crore to NBFC's and HFC's to support the retail lending. Apart from this, it has also approved the partial credit guarantee scheme, he noted.

The CEA said that the government has cleared dues worth Rs 61,000 crores.

To boost the liquidity in the market, the Indian government has cleared dues which is worth more than 60% of 32 CPSEs in the last two months. Under the existing new external benchmarking scheme announced by the Central Bank, more than 8 lakhs or Rs 72,201 crore worth of loans are sanctioned under the new regime till November 27.

Subramanian said that the foreign investors have reposed faith in the country's economy with FDI inflows hitting a record $35 billion during the first half of 2019 -2020 as against the previous record of $31 billion during the same period last year.

The CEA also announced that two-third of the budgeted Capex has been achieved. He further noted that 66% of budgeted capital expenditure has been undertaken already and select CPSE's have undertaken capex of Rs 98,000 crore until November 19, 2019.

Higher Refund of Taxes

Speaking at the Press Conference, Revenue Secretary, Ajay Bhushan Prasad Pandey said that the government has made more refund on both direct and indirect taxes this fiscal, with total refunds at Rs 2.2 lakh crore till November 2019.

Most of the returns were for income tax, wherein the refunds till November were at Rs 1.57 lakh crore as against Rs 1.84 lakh crore for full fiscal of 2018 -19.

For integrated GST, the government has a refund of Rs 38,988 crore until November 2019 as against Rs 56,057 crore for the full-year fiscal 2018. In the same way, input tax credit refunds stood at Rs 33,395 crore till November 2019 as against the previous year's record of Rs 36,513 crore.

On the direct impact of corporate tax reduction, the Revenue Secretary said that the government will get a fair estimate of corporate tax deduction after advance tax instalment which is due this month on December 15.