Garment exporters hail Nirmala Sitharaman’s booster package

TIRUPUR: Garment exporters have hailed the stimulus package announced for boosting industrial demand, including for the MSME sector, by the Union Finance minister, Dr Nirmala Sitharaman in New Delhi on Friday.  

Reacting to the slew of measures to boost the economy, Raja M Shanmugam, president of Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA) said that it will bring business confidence to the crisis-ridden sectors including the MSME sector.  

In a statement here on Saturday, he said that measures like banks to come out with an  improved transparent OTS policy to benefit MSMEs’ and retail borrowers in settling their over dues and decision of banks to pass on rate cuts through ‘MCLR reduction’ to benefit all borrowers, were greatly welcome. “It will be a great relief to the financially stressed Tirupur knitwear garment exporting units in MSME sector,” he said.

While noting down the NPA classification norms, he appealed to revert back to ‘Two Quarter Past Due’ concept (180 days) instead of 90 days prevailing now in the case of MSMEs as it will provide some breathing time for the units to recover and recoup. He also said, “enough and adequate monitoring mechanism may be implemented even if the overdue crosses 90 days to avoid any siphoning off such as being in many big corporate cases. We request for restructuring two times to have a leverage, after considering the seasonal nature of the business.”

“The rebate on state and central taxes and levies was announced on March 7, 2019 for garment sector to reimburse the embedded taxes and levies not covered under GST. Unfortunately, till now no online procedure has been implemented to receive the benefit in the form of duty credit scrip and for Tirupur knitwear garment sector alone, the total pending till now is about Rs 400 crore. We request the Finance Minister to kindly help to expedite the clearing of pending claims at the earliest,” he added.