Finance minister AMA Muhith on Thursday proposed to reduce customs duty on the import of capital machineries to 2 per cent from 3 per cent. He also proposed to reduce customs duty on intermediate raw materials to 10 per cent from 12 per cent.
Muhith, in his budget speech placed in Jatiya Sangsad for the financial year 2013-14, proposed keeping the present exemption notifications on regulatory duty and extension of the same to new items and continuation of the present 5 per cent regulatory duty on machineries chargeable to 25 per cent customs duty.
The finance minister proposed 5 per cent regulatory duty on a few items which are chargeable to 10 per cent customs duty but by nature are not intermediate machineries and also proposed to rationalise the present 9 slab supplementary duty structure with the objective to discourage infiltration of socially undesirable and luxury goods.
He proposed fully withdrawal of the present 5 per cent import duty on artificial filament tow for the textile mills on certain conditions.
Artificial filament tow is used to produce acrylic yarn which is the basic raw material of sweater.
The finance minister said the demand for acrylic yarn-made products including sweater was increasing inside and outside the country.
‘And so I propose to conditional withdrawal of existing 5 per cent import duty on artificial filament tow for the textile mills,’ he said.
Muhith also proposed to bring down the supplementary duty on woven fabrics import to 20 per cent from 45 per cent.
He said the legitimate import of woven fabrics was not increasing proportionately to the demand because of its high tariff. There are allegations that for these reasons, fabrics imported under bond system without payment of duty and taxes are being leaked to the open market, he added.
The finance minister proposed to reduce 45 per cent supplementary duty to 20 per cent in order to encourage commercial import of fabrics through plugging the leakage from bond.
-With New Age input
