Assocham recommends action plan to new government to boost economic growth

Industry body Assocham has outlined an action plan suggesting measures for new government to boost the economic growth.  The action plan is aimed at achieving economic growth of 9 to 10 percent over the medium term and sustaining the high-growth path. Assocham’s action plan highlighted that the new government must introduce single-window clearance for pending projects, relax FDI limits across key sectors, privatise sick PSUs, divest its holding in top 10-15 PSUs to generate over Rs 1 lakh crore of capital. Further, the industry body has also pitched for GST implementation, liberalisation of ECB norms, incentives for investments, restoration of the SEZ policy to its original form and easing of processes for companies planning to set up manufacturing units. Emphasizing the need to create an environment for increasing investments, Assocham President Rana Kapoor said that new government should introduce suitable policy framework to improve the business sentiments in the country. Further, a long term approach to fiscal consolidation along with clear policies is urgently needed for addressing structural bottlenecks and high inflation. Rana Kapoor further added that in order to expedite the implementation of big infrastructure projects, new government must accelerate land acquisition and environment clearances process for mega projects by setting up a joint task force comprising central ministries like environment, finance, administrative along with the states ministries. New government must take measures soon to replace existing state and central levies with a uniform tax as implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST) can boost India's economy by up to two percentage points. Currently, Indian economy is struggling with slowdown and the factors like low investments, slow execution of infrastructure projects and prevailing high interest rates in order to combat elevated inflation have been adversely impacting the domestic economy. Indian economy’s growth slowed down to 4.6% during the first three quarter of FY14 and is likely to remain at sub-5% level in FY14.