NEW DELHI: The government aims to make the new tax regime – without exemptions – attractive enough between the two options for tax filing, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said during the post-Budget presentation conference.
“If the tax rates are low, you are going to benefit by the gained funds. If people think that the old regime is more beneficial, then they may continue with it,” the Finance Minister said while responding to a media query.
“As much as 61 per cent of corporate taxes are coming from exemption-free tax regimes. We are hopeful that the majority will prefer the new regime,” said Sanjay Malhotra, Revenue Secretary when asked about the number of taxpayers opting for an exemption-free tax system. On inflation, Sitharaman said the government and the RBI have been taking steps to keep it under control and the efforts have yielded results.
On job creation, she said whatever projects the government undertakes, the money is utilized on the manpower that completes them. “Even one per cent of projects can’t be completed without human intervention, so jobs are happening on the ground,” Sitharaman stated.
Expenditure secretary T V Somanathan said the government was confident that it would meet the capital expenditure target of Rs 10 lakh crore for FY24. He stated that the shortfall in the utilization of capex is from the states' side and not from the Centre.
“The increased allocation has been made in four areas. The railways has enough projects to use the capital expenditure. Highways have adequate projects running to absorb this capex and third is states (1,30,000 crore). Yes there will be a challenge. But now the states are gearing up and the two years of this experiment helped them to improve their spending capacity and we are seeing an uptick in the second half of this year on the state capital expenditure,” said Somanathan.
In addition, the expenditure secretary said the petroleum capital expenditure is for retro-fitting of refineries to meet emission standards and pollution standards and partly for augmenting the strategic reserves. Besides this, Somanathan said the gross taxes in the coming year will grow at 10.5 per cent by which the government estimated the GDP to grow slightly lower than the figure implied by the survey. “The government will achieve the fiscal deficit target of 4.5 per cent by 2025-26,” he said.
Govt, RBI keeping eye on inflation
The Finance Minister said the Centre and the RBI have been taking steps to keep inflation under control and the efforts have yielded results... jobs are happening on the ground, the FM said