Call to detach restaurant business from multiple licencing

Chennai: It is easier to get a revolver licence in India than getting a licence to sell a burger, said Rahul Singh, president of National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), highlighting the uneven regulatory and licencing regime for restaurant businesses. Representing the industry, he says the business should be unshackled from the chain of multiple licencing regimes.

This fervent plea is not without reason. NRAI has stated that Indian food service industry's current market size of Rs 4,23,865 crore in 2018-19, is expected to grow at a CAGR (Cumulative Annual Growth Rate) of 9% to reach Rs 5,99,782 crore by 2022-23. This was disclosed in the NRAI India Food Services Report 2019, by Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog.

In NRAI IFSR 2019 report, NRAI's research has mapped trends, opportunities and challenges of the sector via a comprehensive compilation of data on food service sector gathered from in-depth interactions with over 130 restaurant CEOs and 3500 consumers across 24 cities.

Compared to other major industries,food service industry is the largest in the service sector after retail and insurance and is 20-times that of the film industry, 4.7x of hotels and 1.5-times of the pharmaceutical sector, Rahul Singh said.

Restaurant industry employed 7.3 million people in 2018-19. The organised food service sector, which is only 35 per cent of the total market, contributed a whopping Rs. 18,000 crore as a way of taxes in 2018-19. The number is expected to more than double if the unorganised sector becomes organised.

  The restaurant industry is the only industry which invest in India, make in India and serve in India, but still highly harassed at every level. A major grouse of the industry is that it was not consulted when Input Tax Credit (ITC) was taken away.