Shabbir Hussain Chawla, President, Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (FCCI) has welcomed the stay-order of Lahore High Court against the unilateral decision of imposing Regulatory Duty on as many as 400 items and reiterated FCCI repeated demand that government must take on board the concerned stakeholders before taking important economic decisions.
In a statement issue here today, he said that business community is the main player of economy but it is totally ignored in the process of decision making. "All such decisions taken unilaterally are generally prove counterproductive and instead of expected benefit, these usually cause irreparable loss to the national economy in addition to sowing seed of contention between the policy makers and business community.
Continuing, Chawla said that business community is patriotic and fully aware of the ill impacts of widening gap between imports and export. "FCCI has taken a principle stand that government should impose regulatory duty only on non-essential and luxury items", he said and added that in the garb of this situation, government has taken a hasty decision without taking the stakeholders into confidence and regulatory duty was also imposed on many items which are widely consumed by industrial sector or used in the manufacturing of exportable goods.
"This resulted in effecting our industrial sector in addition to increasing our cost of production and making our exports uncompetitive on the international markets", he said and added that it was also surprising that government has not completed the basic formalities deemed legally and constitutionally necessary to make such decisions. He said that FCCI had clearly pointed out the items of industrial importance that were included in the impugned SRO. "Had the government consulted the stakeholders and followed the set procedure", it should not have to face the humiliation due to the in-juncture issued by the Lahore High Court in addition to creating an embarrassing situation for the business community. He said that government and policy makers should now learn lesson from this stay order and avoid taking unilateral decisions in future.