Welcome to Indian Industries Association, the apex body of SMEs.

President Speaks

President Speak – May 2009

VAT is Important for MSMEs

Welcome to a burning topic in a hot month!

We planned this issue on VAT Notifications & Circulars keeping in mind the special need of the MSMEs. The original plan was to cover all the relevant departments but when our team plunged into the actual research, they found it to be a voluminous task which could not be covered effectively within a single issue of the newsletter.

The consensus came out to be that we start with one department, covering those states which have IIA’s presence at this point of time. This resulted in the present compendium of VAT notifications and circulars from IIA Member states and the union territory of Delhi.

I would like to share with you an encouraging experience that now even micro enterprises are keen to register with the Commercial Tax department and are contacting our Corporate Office for information on VAT rules and regulations. This was the motivation for choosing it as the first theme in the series. It is a continuing series and more departments will be taken up in the months to come and hopefully more States/UTs. Please do tell us how useful you find it.

Shri Inderchand Jain, Divisional Chairman, Agra, is here with his truly enlightening article “Minimization of the risk of Intellectual Property loss by the Industry”. The best thing about the author’s writings is that the reader’s interest is maintained throughout howsoever lengthy the piece is ! Kudos to your writing prowess Mr.Jain !

I recently had a meeting with the Director, Institute of Company Secretary India(ICSI) where we planned two significant joint activities for the benefit of MSMEs. First- A National Seminar on ‘Corporate Governance in SMEs’ will be organized in Delhi. Second- A MOU shall be signed between IIA and ICSI for conducting joint studies and surveys on MSMEs.

Another major activity which has been planned in collaboration with CII is a study on ‘Corporate Participation in Health in U.P.’ The study shall cover the following 8 industrial clusters:

1.	Footwear of Agra
2.	Leather of Kanpur
3.	Woodwork of Saharanpur
4.	Textile printing of Farrukhabad
5.	Metal work of Moradabad
6.	Sports Goods of Meerut
7.	Small Engineering of NOIDA
8.	Glass & bangles of Ferozabad

During the last CEC Meeting on 17th April, a detailed discussion on IIA website was held and some crucial decisions were taken to make it more useful for IIA Members in particular and MSMEs in general. Our team is already working on it. Your feedback to make this website more useful is invited.

I expect that all the above activities shall prove to be beneficial for the MSME sector.