Surcharge Imposition By Nbr
Brick kilns top on list of polluting industries
The National Board of Revenue is likely to put brick kilns sector on top of its list for imposing environment surcharge as the industry has been identified as the highest in terms of numbers among the sectors that pollute environment in the country, officials said.
The revenue board and Department of Environment have primarily prepared the list for collecting environment surcharge introduced in the budget for the current fiscal year of 2014-15, they said.
According to the list, a total of 924 brick fields are causing environmental pollution across the country.
Textile industry including printing and washing factories have come as the second largest polluting sector in the list as there are 440 factories that have been identified for imposing the surcharge.
The factories which had earlier been penalised by the DoE for violating the Environment Conservation Act-1995 have been included in the list containing the names of 2,498 factories.
DoE has earlier provided the names of the factories to the NBR for imposing the surcharge.
Officials said that there were a total of 255 units of ship breaking, dockyard, steel mills and metal industries sectors which were responsible for polluting environment.
Among other sectors, 200 hospitals, clinics and diagnostic centres, 168 tannery, leather and related factories, 71 rice and jute mills, 57 paper and paper board mills, 32 pharmaceuticals, 25 cold storages, 41 food and agro-processed factories, 41 rubber and plastic factories, 18 chemical factories and 195 factories from other sectors are also responsible for pollution.
The NBR will issue a circular
soon imposing 1 per cent surcharge on them after getting the final list from DoE.
DoE informed the NBR that some factories might be excluded from the list as they became compliant with the law by this time.
The government introduced the surcharge through budgetary measures in the current fiscal year of 2014-15 to protect the environment and encourage the entrepreneurs for setting up effluent treatment plants at factories.
The surcharge will be imposed on the total prices of the products produced in those factories.
The surcharge came into effect from July 1 and the value-added tax wing of the revenue board has already issued surcharge collection rule keeping provisions of freezing bank accounts of a company and suspending the supply of goods of the company for not complying with the rule.
-With New Age input
