India will press ahead with tax reforms, repairing the banking system and getting stalled infrastructure projects moving to drive growth, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Wednesday, but it is not yet ready to sell off its state banks. A revenue-neutral tax changes a country’s tax structure but is not intended to increase the overall amount of tax levied. Jaitley did not say what rate he preferred but the government’s economic adviser has pegged a revenue-neutral rate at about 18 percent. “I don’t think that public or political opinion has converged to the point where we can think of privatisation in the banking sector,” Jaitley told The Economist India Summit in New Delhi. India currently owns stakes of between 60 percent and 86 percent in nearly two dozen state-run banks.

Source: Hindustan Times September 07, 2016 05:15 UTC