Roll back GST hike, KTR urges Centre

● IN A letter to Union textiles minister Piyush Goyal, Rama Rao said textile, especially the handloom sector, was badly hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic and enhancing the tax at this juncture would deal a deathblow to the industry.

Industries and IT minister K.T. Rama Rao on Sunday appealed to the Centre to withdraw the proposal to enhance Goods and Services Tax on textile and handloom from five to 12 per cent.

In a letter to Union textiles minister Piyush Goyal, he said textile, especially the handloom sector, was badly hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic and enhancing the tax at this juncture would deal a deathblow to the industry.

Maintaining that handloom is the second largest employment generating sector after agriculture, Rama Rao said the Centre should have come up with additional incentives to protect interests of weavers. Never in the history of the country were taxes levied on the handloom sector and for the first time the Centre imposed five per cent tax ignoring the strong protest from the industry, he said.

The minister said Telangana state had been producing world-class handloom and expressed concern over the plight of weavers who he said were worried over the Centre’s proposed tax hike. Almost

80 per cent of the units are in the MSME segment, he said.

He also reminded the Union minister of the “vocal for handmade” slogan coined by the textile ministry last year commemorating the National Handloom Day and the target it fixed to increase handloom production to

`1.25 lakh crore and exports to `10,000 crore.