Film industry wants freedom from customs duty, service tax

The film industry is a major foreign exchange earner for the country and therefore technology imported by film-makers should be exempt from customs duty as is done for the information technology industry.

Raising this demand before Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj at a pre-budget meeting, representatives of the film industry said it was ridiculous that a compact disc could be imported duty-free for IT but was liable to 64 per cent duty if imported by a film-maker.

Swaraj, who is to meet Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha on January 16, was also urged to abolish the duty levied on infrastructure such as direct-to-home television and cable access systems.

The film industry was represented, among others, by Yash Chopra, Yash Johar, and Amit Khanna, while television was represented by Sahara TV chief executive officer Mahesh Prasad, Aroon Purie of TV Today, and Bhuvan Lall of the Indian Broadcasters Federation.

The Confederation of Indian Industry was represented by Sanjeev Goenka.

Apart from Swaraj, the ministry was represented by secretary Pawan Chopra, and the joint secretaries in-charge of films and broadcasting.

She was urged that the service tax levied on the film industry should be abolished as it could not be passed on to the viewers. As cinema meant content creation, there should be complete exemption of duty, they said.

Film-makers also said they should not be forced to pay advance income tax in September as they were unsure of when their film would be completed and what revenue, if any, it might earn. It was suggested that advance should only be taken for the quarter during which the film was expected to be released.

Raising other issues, owners of multiplexes lamented that they were not being treated on a par with the hotel industry in the matter of taxation as far as depreciation was concerned.

Leaders of the music industry said the MP3 compact disc should be declared illegal, since it helped audio pirates to make copies of a large volume of music without copyright clearance and then sell these CDs at a profit, which did not reach the actual owner of copyright.

UNI

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