Budget 2019: Corporate leaders recommend tax incentives in garments, engineering industries for job growth

Corporate leaders met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday in a closed-door meeting and recommended incentivising labour-intensive industries like garments and engineering to tackle unemployment in the country. According to reports, one option that the leaders urged the PM to consider is corporate tax concession based on the number of employees. They also discussed other recommendations for job creation such a system of interest-free GST loan on incremental tax payment by SMEs and to reduce employee contribution to EPFO and ESI.

They also discussed ways to implement land reforms, as mentioned in a report in News18. Some of the recommendations include automatically allowing non-irrigated farmland for industrial purposes, introducing dedicated bankruptcy code for real estate as well as allowing higher floor-space index (FSI) to encourage construction.

Apart from the above recommendations, the corporate leaders also suggested 100 per cent foreign direct investment for the insurance sector.

As per the news site, the meeting was attended by Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran, Tata Steel CMD TV Narendran, Anil Agarwal, ITC Chairman Sanjiv Puri, Kotak, AMC's Nilesh Shah, KKR India CEO Sanjay Nayyar, Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Credit Suisse' Neelkanth Mishra, JP Morgan's Sajjid Chinoy, Citi's Samiran Chakraborty and SBI's Soumya Kanti Ghosh.

Newly-appointed Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will present the Union Budget 2019 on July 5. The previous Interim Budget was presented by acting Finance Minister Piyush Goyal on February 1, 2019.

Also read: Budget 2019: Task cut out for Modi 2.0 to put the economy back on growth trajectory

Also read: Budget 2019: Will Nirmala Sitharaman give more tax incentives to home buyers, boost real estate?