Amend ILD licence rules; Trai to govt
New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has asked the government to amend the international long-distance (ILD) licence rules in order to implement its recommendations on the resale of international bandwidth and mandatory sharing of cable landing stations, which will reduce bandwidth rates in India by 40 pc.

The Trai request comes as the department of telecom (DoT) has accepted its recommendations on both the above mentioned issues. The DoT had also asked Trai to provide detailed terms and conditions in respect to these two recommendations so that the government could amend the relevant clauses of the ILD licence agreement.
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Sales tax should be scrapped: Maharashtra CM
Mumbai: Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh has asked the Centre to scrap sales tax and instead introduce an integrated national tax on goods and services.

Speaking at the recently held National Development Council meet chaired by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, Deshmukh suggested that the Centre and the state government should tax all services and inter-state services in the same manner as inter-state sales, that is, taxation on destination principle.

Deshmukh said it is necessary to move to the modern system for which the government should begin a process and reform the present central sales tax system wherein the exporting state taxes the consumption in the importing states.

The proposal is fully compatible with the basic principles of VAT and also protects the exporting states from potential wrongful claims of input tax credit by any exporter in that state Deshmukh said. He also expressed the need to convert the state VAT into a standard VAT on goods and services.
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Industrial growth down to 6.2 pc in October
New Delhi: Industrial production growth during October this year has fallen to a low of 6.2 per cent compared to 9.8 per cent in October 2005 mainly on account of the poor performance of the manufacturing sector.

This is the lowest growth recorded during the first seven months of the current financial year, according to the official data released here on Tuesday.

Manufacturing registered a growth of six per cent in October against 10.9 per cent in the same month last year. Production in consumer goods sector recorded a growth of 0.5 per cent during October against 14.6 per cent in the same month of 2005.

Consumer durables grew by 2.4 per cent during October 2006 against 16.4 per cent in the same month last year, consumer non-durables went down to 0.4 per cent as against 14 per cent last year.

Capital goods output also slowed down considerably to 8.2 per cent during October against a high of 24.3 per cent in October last year. The basic goods sector, however, registered a growth of 9.9 per cent from seven per cent a year ago.

Power generation went up by 9.7 per cent against 7.7 per cent last year, while mining output increased by four per cent against a decline in growth of 0.1 per cent in October 2005.
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