KARACHI: Terming the Budget 2017-18 announced on May 26, 2017, a balanced one, Lasbela Chamber of Commerce and Industry President Ismail Suttar has said that more steps are required to ensure industrial growth and to address the difficulties to achieve export targets. The Budget 2017-18 “seems to be an initiative to give relief to the common people to some extent”, he said. “It may be called a balanced budget for the economic revival, aiming at resolving the energy crisis, promoting investment and boosting agriculture production.” However, he pointed out that the budget had not ensured any concrete steps for the promotion of hydroelectric power generation to take advantages of its potential in the country. He said that enormous volume debt was also a great burden on the economy for which Rs 1,400 billion had been allocated for debt servicing. “This amount should have been spent on the infrastructure development of the country. The reduction of duty and taxes on various machinery and industrial items would, however, leave positive effects on the industry to some extent but cannot be termed as incentive.” While appreciating the measures taken for the agriculture growth, he apprehended that whatever had been announced for this sector was not given to it in the past. “That is why the farmers’ standard of living remained unchanged. The need is to build big water reservoirs to store the floodwater, which may be used throughout the year, helping enormous increase in agriculture products.” He said that on one hand the government had estimated the need of millions of houses to accommodate the homeless people of the country but on the other hand the budget had not given any incentive to the construction industry and on the machinery and equipments used in this industry. “This issue should have been addressed in the wake of CPEC as well.” He said that it was an appreciable step for the ordinary citizens that the concept of provisional income tax assessments had been abolished by omitting the respective section from the income tax ordinance. “The rate of tax of 15 percent for filers and 20 percent for non-filers is also reasonable to expand the tax net. The increase in the tax in dividend and imposition of flat rate of capital gain tax would not only leave negative impact on capital market but also badly affect many other sectors.” Conclusively it may be said that the proposed budget measures may not help reduce the cost of doing business to boost industrial and agriculture growth to an optimum level, he said. “It is very important for the government to understand that we have a huge population which needs to be absorbed in such a way that each and every member of society adds something to the GDP. This is only possible by taking measures for industrial growth for which actions on war footings are required that can ensure rapid industrialisation across the board in all the provinces, focusing on rapid growth of SMEs. This will result in massive employment.” He said that to achieve all this, the government would have to reconsider the PTAs and FTAs the country had signed in the past with the vision of making Pakistan a trading nation. “We will have to understand that Pakistan needs to be industrialised to the core to absorb this massive population growth. Budget seriously misses this vision and to be honest we do not expect visionary decisions by this government at all.”