Ludhiana: Induction furnace owners of the city and state are furious over both state and central governments turning blind eye to their problems which are making doing business impossible. On Friday, a large number of prominent businessmen gathered to attend a meeting called by The Induction Furnace Association of North India (IFANI) at a city hotel.
According to K K Garg, president of IFANI, “Induction furnace industry of Punjab is facing a huge crisis. The major problems that we are facing are related with GST. Our entire industry is favour of curbing the incidents of bogus billing and tax evasion, but the system being adopted by the state
GST and centre GST authorities is not justified as in such cases they block input tax credit (ITC) of innocent companies too due to fault of their suppliers and others in the supply chain. Steel manufacturing industry buys required scrap against tax invoice, but there remain uncertainty about the deposit of the tax by supplier to the exchequer and we have no system to check this. When some supplier defaults the tax payment, it not only results in revenue loss in some cases, but this also leads to portraying of genuine buyer as tainted in the eyes of department. Moreover, option to denial of ITC in the name of fictitious billing in case of non-deposit of tax collected on the sale has exaggerated the woes for the manufacturer and buyer. We request the centre government and GST authorities to pay attention to this genuine problem due to which our industry is facing huge problems.”
According to Dev Gupta, general secretary of IFANI, “Besides our woes related to GST the other big concern right now is the manipulation of rates by the illegal SMS services provider operating from Mandi Gobindgarh. These SMS about fake fluctuation in the steel rates have destroyed the normal working of the steel industry. It is difficult to buy raw material or sell finished product as rates changes every hour due to SMS being circulated by a mafia. Steel price are fixed according to the situation of the market on the basis of demand and supply and generally Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), a government of India enterprise fixes the steel rates of the market for the specific monthly period and these rates are available on its websites. But even then some persons who are neither manufacture nor authorised by any competent authority to fix and circulate steel rates, are fraudulently circulating fake and wrong steel rates-prices through bulk SMS mode in every fifteen minutes. There is no physical market in the world, where the steel prices can be changed in every 15 minutes. The main purpose of the aforesaid persons is only to play ‘satta’ (gamble) on the steel fluctuating prices deliberately created by them. But by doing this they are manipulating the rate of the steels just to disturb the market and by doing so they get illegal gains and commissions from the different brokers and traders. Both state and centre government need to immediately curb this practice and deal with these elements at the earliest so that our industry can operate normally, as it was doing years ago when this malpractice was not going on.”
Source:-timesofindia.indiatimes.com