Reportedly the meetings the Finance Minister has been holding over the past few days continued with the latest one with the country’s automobile sector. Meanwhile the industry was represented by R C Bhargava, Chairman of maruti Suzuki, pawan Munjal, Chairman of Hero Group and Rajan Wadhera, President of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), among others. Furthermore the main demand put forward by the auto industry was to bring down the GST on cars to 18% from the 28% charged now.
Apparently the purpose of these meetings Nirmala Sitharaman has been holding is to learn directly from the different stakeholders in the economy on what they think the government can do to put the economy back on its growth trajectory and come up with the solutions within a short period of time. Further the attendance at the meeting was quite broad-based with the issue of lack of easy credit for the automobile dealer as well as the customers who wish to avail loans to buy cars was also discussed.
Moreover to address this, the ministers of state for finance, finance secretary, revenue secretary the Heavy Industries Minister Arvind Sawant were also co-opted and so were the officials from the road transport ministry. Perhaps the automobile sector has witnessed a 12.35% drop in the sales of automobiles, all categories put together, in the April to June quarter of 2019 and the numbers were 69,42,742 units in 2018 and 60,85,406 units this year and these figures have been released by SIAM.
