CII calls for phasing out APM for oil, coal, power

"While competitiveness of Indian industry had crippled due to uneconomic cost of capital, high cost and low quality of power, lack of flexibility in use of labour and poor infrastructure facilities, it has further compounded due to increase in Chinese imports, SSI reservation policy, weak anti-dumping mechanism and rupee volatility," CII said.

It called for setting up a state-of-the-art anti-dumping organisation to levy definitive anti-dumping duty to counter China’s cheap exports.

Underscoring the need for dereservation of SSI in the wake of quantitative restrictions on imports going in April 2001, CII said the process needed to be kick-started by dereserving four key export areas – toys, shoes, leather and apparel/garments.

CII demanded privatisation of ports and airports to move infrastructural bottlenecks that were leading to time and cost over-runs of projects and speeding up completion of pending infrastructure projects.

Stating that 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) should be allowed in housing sector, the chamber suggested using corpus of Resurgent India Bonds as seed capital to finance or re-finance infrastructure projects.

Privatisation was essential to bring about a sustained reduction in fiscal deficit and releasing revenues to meet infrastructure and social objectives, CII said, adding the current year target of raising Rs 10,000 crore through disinvestment of public sector enterprises was unlikely to be met.

While the disinvestment process should be totally delayed with time-bound implementation of Cabinet approvals, organised labour should support through a new National Restructuring Fund created out of the sale of latent value of excess land of PSEs located in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Calcutta and Kanpur.

Thirty three per cent of land sale proceeds should be earmarked for financing attractive voluntary retirement schemes (VRS) packages and re-training programmes for the involuntarily unemployed workers, CII said.

The chamber also called for a white paper to set out the plan for reforming government pensions along with adoption of Eradi Commission report on insolvency of companies.

"A new Insolvency Bill has to be drafted, scrapping Sick Industries Companies Act (SICA) and Board for Industrial Finance and Restructuring (BIFR) which were impeding winding up of bankrupt and sick companies," it said.

Demanding scrapping of purchase preference scheme for public sector undertakings, CII suggested starting process of bank privatisation by creating a policy environment that facilitates privatisation of at least one public sector banks.

Giving sector specific suggestion, the CII study said the government should come out very clearly with a transparent policy on import of sector hand vehicles and ban vehicles, especially trucks which are more than 15 years old.

The chamber suggested prioritising research and development in biotech sector by rationalising procedures and reducing number of agencies involved in distribution of funds.

It called for promotion of concretisation of roads and specific proposals to give boost to housing and construction activities while demanding strengthening the anti-dumping mechanism for steel sector.

A pro-growth new drug policy liberalising price control regime needs to be announced immediately for enabling pharmaceuticals sector achieve its true potential, CII said adding a system should be evolved for selling essential drugs through public distribution system (PDS) while putting in place a regulatory framework for controlling the sector.