VELLORE: Noted columnist S Gurumurthy called upon the BJP government to gradually withdraw the corporate tax exemption to the tune of `5 lakh crore for corporates in order to revive the economy.
Moderating a discussion on the Union Budget 2014-15 held at VIT University on Sunday, he said, “The policy introduced by the previous Congress government was a big drain on the economy. It will be a big challenge to the BJP government to tackle this issue.”
He observed that the budget presented by Finance Minister Jaitley appeared to be a continuation of the UPA budget presented by the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram. While contribution of the corporate sector to the GDP was around 15 per cent, the contribution of the non-corporate sector was around 46 per cent. But no government had so far come out with a comprehensive policy for this non-corporate sector in any of the budgets so far, he said.
“It is time this sector gets recognition as studies have shown that 90 per cent of employment was generated by the sector in rural areas, where a majority of people belonged to the deprived sections of the community. None of the media had spoken or discussed the core of the budget, that represented the non-corporate sector,” he added.
He said the mistake done by the previous UPA government in the last 10 years led to the decline of public sector employment.
“Despite the large investment that came into the country, we became bankrupt due to mismanagement. This resulted in the rupee’s value dropping. Because of this, the economy declined further. The distribution of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, that accounted for 75 per cent of the currency, also had its way of generating black money. Between 2002-2011, around 350 billion US dollars worth of black money had gone out of India, he said quoting reports.