Tourism is one of the most affected sectors due to the covid pandemic. The most flourished sector is now striving for its survival. This pandemic had a crippling effect on this sector. It was estimated that approximately 5.5 million jobs were lost in the travel and tourism sector due to the unexpected pandemic.
“This was the worst three quarters ever for the tourism industry over a century and this is expected to play out till another two quarters till a vaccine is deployed across all source and destination markets," Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism and Hospitality (FAITH) Chairman Nakul Anand.
The tourism sector hopes for revival and recovery strategies from the union budget 2021.
Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism and Hospitality (FAITH) has been making a lot of requests to the Finance Ministry to give incentives for the upliftment of the tourism sector in 2021.
They have made a statement where in they've listed their expectations and some of them are listed below:
1. The 18% GST category in hotels and restaurants must be abolished and merged with the lower rate categories.
2. Taxes on fuel, Inter- state transportation taxes, power cess, liquor excise and also property taxes, cess on parking charges, are all forms of very high cost input indirect costs on tourism, travel & hospitality. These need to be made available as input costs setoffs for GST
3. 100% tax exemption and permission to write back income / TDS/ GST etc must be provided for when the airlines windup.
4. Abolishment of tax on export earnings and TCS, foreign earnings should be taxed at zero rate.
5. SEIS duty credit needs to be made available to the tourism industry against their foreign exchange earnings and the rate must be pegged at 10% for both tour operators and hotels category and is made applicable on gross foreign exchange earnings for the policy period of the FTP 2020-25.
6. Setting up of Global Mice bidding fund with Rs. 500 crores.
7. A Natural & Cultural Heritage Restoration Fund must be set up with a corpus of at least ₹ 2000 crores which encourages sustainable and responsible development around each vertical of natural & cultural heritage tourism
8. To make available the deduction in respect of earnings in convertible foreign exchange to all the tourism & hospitality units earning. Tourism forex earnings should be effectively zero rated for GST.
9. Standardizing all tourism transportation taxes and making them payable at a single point to facilitate the ease of doing business.
The tourism sector has seen a massive loss during the last year due to lockdown and restriction on movement of people after lockdown. Tourism sector needs a well drawn strategy to turnaround to come back to its original position. Vaccines have become a ray of hope to this sector. With the start of the vaccination process, many people in the sector have sighed in relief. We can see a slight increase in the tourism business in the past few months.
However, a slight nudge from the Government may prove to be a lot helpful to the tourism sector to regain its old glory.
CAclubindia
