Reforms have transformed the Left: Khorakiwala

New Delhi, Jan 10 (UNI) The new FICCI President Habil Khorakiwala today expressed the hope that Budget will have enough measures to spur growth and said his Chamber has outlined measures, including in the field of education, to make the growth process more inclusive.

''FICCI will adopt 500 ITIs for upgrading their standards and will bring out a position paper on structural reforms in Higher Education,'' Mr Khorakiwala told UNI.

He said the syllabus of ITI's has outlived its utility and management and technological changes need to be brought in to ensure that students are effectively able to develop skills which will enable them to get jobs.

Mr Khorakiwala said industry is constrained by the lack of availability of suitable manpower and there was an urgent need for developing skills.

He averred to the fact that finding a job was no longer a problem if a person had the right skills.

Mr Khorakiwala said while growth has proceeded at a brackneck speed, education had not kept pace with it. The government was, therefore, right in focussing on two key elements relating to social sectors -- health and education.

Mr Khorakiwala, who is Chairman of Wockhardt Limited, said growth would also be constrained if there were not enough healthy people.

The well known industrialist was hopefull that Budget 2006-07 will provide a thrust to growth and suggested measures in this regard. He said Finance Minister P Chidambaram will do well to replace Sales Tax with Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the coming Budget itself instead of waiting for some more years to do this.

Besides, efforts at tax simplification need to be continued.

Mr Khorakiwala said there was a strong case for eliminating cess and surcharges as they distort the tax structure. Besides, the average tax burden on the Corporate sector needs to be brought down from the present level of about 37 per cent to about 25 per cent.

This would require bringing down the dividend distribution tax and rationalisation of the Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT).

Mr Khorakiwala was of the view that the economy was moving in the right direction and while one may disagree with the pace of reforms, the fact of the matter is that they will take place and should take place.

He said a formidable achievement of the reform process has been evolution of a political consensus in this regard and the thinking of left parties has undergone a change. This was obvious from the policies being pursued by the CPI(M) government in West Bengal, notwithstanding their rhetoric against reforms at the Centre.

Mr Khorakiwala said India's great asset was its bulging youth population and if policies are re-oriented then finding jobs for them would not be a problem.

He said the Western World, including countries of the European Union, were confronted with huge greying population which will be a barrier to their future growth. On the other hand, in India it was a situation of democratic dividends.

Mr Khorakiwala felt that had reforms been launched earlier many of the benefits that were being witnesssed now would have been available earlier.

To a question as to whether the quality of ledership in industry had waned over the years away from the visionaries of the pre-independence and early years of post-independence India, Mr Khorakiwala was not forthright in his reply.

He said the focus of business leaders had shifted to developing their own companies rather than work in a major way on a national canvas. ''Those were different times,'' he said and added that the system which evolved after independence did not give enough respect to businessmen. However, many of the economic changes that have been witnessed in recent years have resulted from the actions and hard work of the business community.

UNI