Reeling under the impact of global slowdown and a high interest rate regime, India Inc on Monday demanded that tax rates be retained at existing levels even as finance minister Pranab Mukherjee expressed concerns about challenges facing the economy.In their customary pre-Budget meeting with Mukherjee, industry leaders also demanded that healthcare services be kept outside service tax ambit, and privatise coal mines.

The importance of an inclusive financial system is widely recognized in the policy circles not only in India but has become a policy priority in many countries. Several countries across the globe now look at financial inclusion as the means of a more comprehensive growth, wherein each citizen of the country is able to use their earning as a financial resource that they can put to work to improve their future financial status, adding to the nation’s progress.

Expressing hope that the Companies Bill, 2009, will be passed by Parliament in 2011, the Corporate Affairs Minister, Veerappa Moily, today said his ministry was ready with the Cabinet note for the legislation. Companies Bill will be passed, if not in this (monsoon) session, (then) definitely in the winter session, Moily told reporters on the sidelines of a FICCI meet here.

Asked by the government for suggestions on a new set of rules for ownership and governance of the stock exchanges, the industry has favoured listing of the bourses.However, there is no unanimity among the industry bodies and the exchanges themselves on how to segregate the regulatory and commercial roles of stock exchanges.

Rajiv Kumar, a well-known economist, has been appointed as the FICCI secretary general, a post vacated by Amit Mitra who has joined the Mamata Banerjee government in West Bengal as finance minister.

Amit Mitra, who is tipped to become the next Finance Minister of West Bengal in the Trinamool Congress-led government, has resigned as Ficci Secretary General. Mitra, 63, emerged as a ‘giant killer’ by defeating CPI(M) veteran and state Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta by a big margin from the Khardah Assembly constituency.

Ministry of Finance has initiated a public debate on the issue of a negative list for taxation of services as announced by the Finance Minister, Shri Pranab Mukherjee in his Budget 2011. The text of the speech is as below-Many experts have argued that it will be desirable to tax services based on a small negative list, so that many untapped sectors are brought into the tax net. Such an approach will be very conducive for a nationwide GST. I propose to initiate an informed public debate on the subject to help us finalise the approach to GST.

It is my pleasure to speak at FICCI’s National Executive Committee Meeting this year. As many observers have been highlighting, after a relatively long phase of benign, growth-friendly macroeconomic conditions, things have begun to look somewhat hostile on the macroeconomic front. The most significant manifestation of this is the acceleration of inflation, a trend that was visible even before the impact of the financial crisis was felt in late 2008, but which very quickly and strongly re-emerged as the economy began to recover in the second half of 2009-10. Despite significant actions on both policy rates and liquidity by the Reserve Bank, inflation remains high, giving rise to some very fundamental questions: is this high rate of inflation, previously believed to be unacceptable, now the new normal? Is it an unavoidable price to pay for sustaining the current growth trend? Or, will it actually work to undermine the sustainability of the current trend?

Leading India Inc representatives today made a strong plea to the Reserve Bank to review its rate tightening policy, saying the high cost of credit is having an adverse impact on growth. Quoting a recent study, industry body FICCI’s Vice-President and HSBC’s Country Head, Naina Lal Kidwai, said a majority of firms feel inflation and successive rate hikes in the key monetary variables “have started having a bearing on the industry’s performance.”

Union Finance Minister Shri Pranab Mukherjee met here today the film industry delegation who were accompanying the Minister of Information and Broadcasting Ms. Ambika Soni as part of his pre-Budget consultations. The delegation consisted of about 20