A Long hope for relif to the District Mineral Foundations of Odisha in “The Gazette of india”
Odisha News Today Bureau:
The Gazette of India, published by the Government of India, dated 10th September 2020 brought long hoped for relief to the District Mineral Foundations of Odisha. It was a culmination of an effort initiated nearly a year ago.
Following up on the demand made by his leader and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on 3 October 2019, Dr Amar Patnaik, Member of Parliament raised it for the first time during Zero hour in Parliament on 4.12.2019. Several letters and correspondence between him and the Finance and Mines Ministers culminated in this significant concession to the DMFs.
He says “ this would increase their space to carry out vital socio- economic and environmental development works in the mining areas. While Odisha supplies all types of minerals to the rest of India and the country benefits immensely from this, the people of Odisha have to deal with the associated hazards of mining. The District Mineral Foundations were created to address these problems and provide a healing touch to these displaced and affected people of our State.
However there was no tax relief being given to these organisations. This caused a huge hole in the foundations budget, crippling it and reducing their abilities to undertake large scale socio-economic projects for the communities.
It is this worthy cause that Hon Chief Minister had been fighting for. I too had raised this issue in Parliament and demanded that the Finance Minister waive off Income Tax and other taxes as well. I had also taken up with the Mines Minister to expedite the process.
We are glad to state that now the Government of India has announced that IT will be waived for all DMF’s with retrospective effect. It has huge revenue savings in excess of a thousand crores and more on the unutilized portions of the DMF funds in our state and further recurring income tax liability in excess of 150 crores per year on interest income from these unutilized money kept in banks.
This is a great victory and I salute our Hon. Chief Minister for tirelessly spearheading this effort.”