Political and Social Issues

The Union Cabinet on Tuesday gave its approval to the long-awaited ambitious National Manufacturing Policy (NMP), which seeks to set up mega industrial zones, create 100 million jobs by 2022 and put India on a par with manufacturing powers such as China and Japan.
Ruling out any kind of subsidies for units operating in these manufacturing zones, the newly approved policy states that the government will provide fiscal incentives to industry
the interventions proposed were generally sector neutral, location neutral and technology neutral, except the attempt to incentivise green technology for sustainable development.
The major objectives of the NMP are to increase the sectoral share of manufacturing in GDP to at least 25 per cent, create 100 million jobs by 2022 and enhance global competitiveness of the sector. Besides, it focusses on domestic value addition, technological depth and environmental sustainability of growth.
The NMP aims at creating large integrated industrial townships — National Investment and Manufacturing Zones (NIMZs). “The land for these zones will preferably be waste infertile land which is not suitable for cultivation; not in the vicinity of any ecologically fragile area and with reasonable access to basic resources,''
At present, the contribution of the manufacturing sector is just over 16 per cent of India's GDP.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on Tuesday approved the setting up of 15 new mega food park projects in addition to the 15 ongoing projects under the Infrastructure Development Scheme
The projects are meant to bring about substantial reduction of wastage, value addition, employment generation and increased income for farmers.
Innovative supply chain management will be the key to implementation of this scheme.
The timeline for project implementation of each food park is 24 months
The estimated investment in each project will be about Rs.100 crore in common facilities
In each project, an estimated number of 30-40 food processing industries must be set up.
The scheme is expected to operate in hub and spoke model under which there will be farm proximate Collection Centres (CC) and Primary Processing Centres (PPC) which will set up cleaning, grading, sorting and packing facilities, dry warehouses, specialised cold stores, including pre-cooling chambers, ripening chambers, mobile pre-coolers and mobile collection vans.

Services provided by sub-contractors to a works contract service (WCS) provider engaged in infrastructure projects will not attract service tax — if they are independently classifiable under the WCS — if related to the infrastructure projects undertaken by the main contractor.
Currently works contracts services (WCS) on construction of dams, tunnels, roads and bridges are exempt from service tax.
In May the Finance Ministry had said that sub-contractors will have to pay service tax on all “taxable services” provided by them to a WCS provider engaged in construction of infrastructure projects.
It may happen that the main infrastructure projects of execution of works contracts in respect of roads, airports, railways, transport terminals, bridges, tunnels and dams is sub-divided into several sub-projects and each such sub-project is assigned by the main contractor to the various sub-contractors. In such cases, if the sub-contractors are providing works contract service to the main contractor for completion of the main contract, then service tax can obviously not be levied on the works contract service provided by such sub-contractor