The Printers’ Association meets The Government -
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My views —
The initiative to discuss the printers’ issues with the local Government is a good step forward. Printing is an industry creating products for all businesses or individuals and the printed product is a necessity in almost all work fields. It is strange that while the printed product is a necessity for all businesses the printing industry itself is a highly unorganized sector. Lack of clarity of rules and different rules for different scale of printers creates a huge disparity between competing printers and destroys the objectives of a level playing field. While talking about moving printers from the “orange” to “green” category might be a good step, pollution and environment issues should be addressed on measured dynamics and merit since polluting effluents need to be monitored. This means while traditional offset, flexo, gravure and screen printers might still be discharging effluents, the modern digital printers are the ones who are truly heralding the printing industry to a no discharge non polluting industry. More important than these issues are the ambiguities regarding the VAT and Excise applicability and rates which, according to me, is the biggest differentiator between the competitiveness of printers. A stable, regulated and standardized tax rate structure will help in printers becoming more competitive and more importantly will help them in becoming more tax compliant. A lot of printers today are evading tax not because they truly want to evade tax but purely because they are ignorant about what tax and what amount of tax needs to be charged by them. I hope that these interactions with the Government will be more meaningful and will help in making the printing industry more organized, modernized and recognized and do not just be a 15 minute photo-opportunity exercise like in the past.
Click Here to Read this article
My views —
The initiative to discuss the printers’ issues with the local Government is a good step forward. Printing is an industry creating products for all businesses or individuals and the printed product is a necessity in almost all work fields. It is strange that while the printed product is a necessity for all businesses the printing industry itself is a highly unorganized sector. Lack of clarity of rules and different rules for different scale of printers creates a huge disparity between competing printers and destroys the objectives of a level playing field. While talking about moving printers from the “orange” to “green” category might be a good step, pollution and environment issues should be addressed on measured dynamics and merit since polluting effluents need to be monitored. This means while traditional offset, flexo, gravure and screen printers might still be discharging effluents, the modern digital printers are the ones who are truly heralding the printing industry to a no discharge non polluting industry. More important than these issues are the ambiguities regarding the VAT and Excise applicability and rates which, according to me, is the biggest differentiator between the competitiveness of printers. A stable, regulated and standardized tax rate structure will help in printers becoming more competitive and more importantly will help them in becoming more tax compliant. A lot of printers today are evading tax not because they truly want to evade tax but purely because they are ignorant about what tax and what amount of tax needs to be charged by them. I hope that these interactions with the Government will be more meaningful and will help in making the printing industry more organized, modernized and recognized and do not just be a 15 minute photo-opportunity exercise like in the past.
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