Commerce ministry holds 60 outreach programmes on GST

The commerce ministry has organised over 60 outreach programmes since July 1 for members of trade and industry on issues related to the Goods and Services Tax (GST), an official said today.

It has also established GST cells in all public sector undertakings including MMTC, STC, PEC and India Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO), which come within the ministry's purview.

The whole aim is to disseminate all information related to GST to all the stakeholders, said the official, who did not want to be named.

Besides these state-run firms, the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) here and its different regional offices too have set up a GST facilitation cells to resolve issues of exporters and importers.

All the senior officials of the ministry and customs authorities are attending those outreach programmes being organised by Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) and different export promotion councils, the official said.

Although the ministry is taking steps to help exporters deal with issues related to indirect tax regime, FIEO has demanded resolution of their concern pertaining to liquidity crunch.

"Besides high cost of credit which has been blunting the competitive edge of our exports, restriction on inter-state job work from unregistered suppliers are also some of the other major issues which should be looked into by the government," FIEO President Ganesh Kumar Gupta has said in a statement.

He added that the order booking position from October onwards is not very promising and increasing pressure on liquidity under GST may affect exports in the last quarter of 2017.

(This article has not been edited by Zeebiz editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)